We Shall Inherit the Wind (23 page)

‘What!’ Magnusson shouted. ‘A contract killer?’

‘I don’t know if you have a neighbour – a tall, well-built man with a leather jacket?’ Neither of them reacted. ‘That was more what I had imagined.’

‘So you thought that Mons had … that Stig was supposed to be …’ Slowly she began to see the light. Then she stared mutely into the distance.

Magnusson coughed. ‘I hope you’re not planning to exploit the situation you find yourself in …’

‘I haven’t planned to do anything except get to the real truth in this matter.’ I leaned across the table and looked at Lea Mæland again. ‘What was the deal you and Mons struck when you disappeared in 1982?’

She let out a heavy sigh, raised her eyes and looked at me with a resigned air. ‘I know you’ve … I’m going to tell you everything. But first you have to tell me something. Mons: Was he murdered?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose he was.’

‘By whom?’

‘By an old friend of yours. Bjørn Brekkhus.’

‘Bjørn!’ She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘But why on earth …?’

‘Whether you believe it or not, Bjørn Brekkhus was besotted with you, Lea. I think you can probably say that … besotted. You must have noticed.’

She nodded, and two red patches high up on her small cheeks
appeared. ‘Yes, now you say that … Of course I knew he was a bit in love with me. But …’ She tossed her head coquettishly.

‘There were so many of them?’

‘Something like that. At any rate I can assure you there was never anything between us. I’ve never been unfaithful in my life … to anyone. Unlike some people.’

‘Your husband, for example?’ I quickly added: ‘Yes, now I’m talking about Mons.’

She eyed me sharply. Then she gave a slight nod of the head. ‘He … When he came to me that time and told me about Ranveig and said he wanted a divorce, that came like a bolt from the blue. I thought we had the perfect marriage. When I think about what I had sacrificed for him: the relationship with my parents, the break with my childhood environment. And that was the thanks I got. Being … stabbed in the back. It was true to say the initial passion had cooled, but that’s true for most people, isn’t it? We had children. We had a house, and a cabin and a secure life. What did he see in her? What did she give him that I couldn’t? Everything seemed to collapse around me. The difficult pregnancies, the complicated births, the time afterwards. Everything I had fought for, only to return to the daily grind. And then this was how he rewarded me!’ She tossed her head. ‘What was I to do? I had no formal training. I hadn’t been home since I was a girl. I would have drowned myself if I hadn’t …’

‘If you hadn’t …?’

‘If I hadn’t been so happy to be alive. But I faced up to the realities of life, and when he suggested … Together we made a plan.’ She paused.

‘An insurance scam.’

‘Well, I had to live! Fair enough. Call it that if you like. Mons had his connections …’ She glanced at Stig Magnusson. ‘He made a call, fixed me up with a job in Sweden. Nothing brilliant, but something I could do: Secretary. Typing, simple bookkeeping. And so I went. Took the train the whole way. First to Oslo, later down through Sweden to Malmö. He took care of everything at home. After two years I was declared dead, the insurance company paid up and then the money started to come …’  

‘But not in your name?’

‘No, in the meantime Stig and I …’

Magnusson coughed yet again. ‘Yes, to cut a long story short. Eva – which I will always call her – came here, found a job in my company, and after a few months we established … an understanding. An understanding which developed, at least for me it did, into the great passion of my life, and we married on New Year’s Eve 1983. We’ve been happy ever since, haven’t we.’ He looked at his spouse, and she nodded solemnly, though also pensively, as if not quite sure yet that this was the correct conclusion to draw.

‘But surely you needed papers to do this, didn’t you?’

His face was impassive. ‘We fixed it. Everything can be arranged if there is the will. And the money …’

I glanced from one face to the other. It sounded so reasonable when they told the story like this. In the end my eyes remained on her. ‘But there’s something I don’t understand … You had two small children: a boy of twelve and a girl of only four. How could you just leave them?’

With a blank expression, she replied: ‘What did you say your name was again?’

‘Varg Veum.’

‘Varg. There’s something you men will never understand, and that is what we women go through to give birth to the children you implant in us.’

‘Implant? You’re fairly active in the process, aren’t you?’

Her eyes flashed. ‘It’s not you, though, who have to go through the pregnancy, is it? You don’t find yourself on your back in the delivery room, with your legs wide apart, screaming with pain, being cut open sometimes – your perineum or straight to the womb. You don’t have to put the wet, still bloody, creature to your breast or feel bare gums on your nipples or feel life being sucked out of you, maybe for ever, by a tiny creature – a little ape …’

I didn’t answer. Right now, she was beyond all dialogue. She was back in her own painful past.

‘I still feel nauseous when I think about it. It makes my stomach
churn. I’ll tell you this: I never felt any love for those two children. After I had finally recovered from the first birth I promised myself never again. But seven years later I was pregnant again once more. Even though I took very great care, but he …’ She was whispering now. ‘He raped me. Once he came home very drunk and we had unprotected sex, as they call it. When I found out I was … I wished I could have it aborted. But you have to understand … If you only knew the people I had grown up among. My parents, they were fundamentalists. They thought the world came into being four and a half thousand years ago. They thought Adam and Eve really lived, that the serpent was a dominant force in life and that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets given directly to him by God. They held true to the letter of their religion. The very idea of interrupting a pregnancy … Abortion was a dirty word for them, as bad as invoking Evil itself. I couldn’t have an abortion. It was impossible! So when Else was born, an equally complicated, equally painful birth as the first, I had a break-down, a complete breakdown. I was admitted to hospital, and when I came out … well, I functioned, more or less. But – as I said – I never felt any love for them. Leaving them was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.’

‘But did you never think about them, about how it must have felt?’

‘Yes, but that’s precisely why it was easier for them to believe I was dead. Being drowned was like being cleansed. Everyone would think it was an accident. After a seemly period of mourning Ranveig and Mons could …’

‘Not long enough according to your children – today.’

She sent me a vacant look. ‘Really?’

‘And Mons, did he stay in contact with you in any way? Did he pass on any messages? Pictures of your grandchildren? Kristoffer has two children. I think they’re …’

‘Never. All he passed onto me was money, via his old business connection. Why would he send me anything else? I was as good as dead and buried. Well, at least dead.’

‘Lise Brekkhus – Bjørn’s wife, that is – she called you an angel. That was what her husband considered you.’  

‘I did the best I could. I wished no one any harm, not even Mons and Ranveig …’

‘Mons, on the other hand, had skeletons in the cupboard. A young child on Brennøy, for example.’

She blinked in surprise. Then she shook her head. ‘What are you talking about now? Surely not Ole?’

‘Yes, your nephew.’

‘You’ve heard the rumours, too, have you?’

‘The rumours?’

‘Yes, I don’t know who spread them, but, if you ask me, there were some real busybodies on the island, both male and female. And one thing I can tell you for sure is that Mons was not Ole’s father.’

‘Really?’

‘Kristine came to me for a private conversation when she heard that Mons and I … that we were going to get married. She wanted me to know, as the only person in the world apart from her, that Mons certainly was not Ole’s father. She and Mons had never been together – in that way – she said.’

‘So it was your brother after all then? Lars?’

The surprise in her eyes was so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. ‘Lars? No, it wasn’t Lars either. It was Bjørn.’

‘Bjørn Brekkhus!’

‘That’s what Kristine said anyway. It all happened at a dance they’d been to at Soleibotn. Brekkhus had been on duty at the arrangement. He was a few years older than Mons and her, good-looking and elegant, and she had felt what my father would have called the devil in her blood. In the course of the evening he had got her behind some rocks, kissed and hugged her and … seduced her.’

‘Right.’ I recognised Bjørn Brekkhus’ own story of a few weeks ago, only with a slightly different narrative.

‘Six weeks later she discovered something was wrong, but in the meantime she had got engaged to Lars. And what was more it was Lars she loved after all. Bjørn was just a passing ship in the night.’

‘So he never found out?’

‘Never. Kristine and I are the only two who know. Now there are two more,’ she said, looking from her Swedish husband to me.

I sat watching her. She was still an attractive woman, but her crimson hair set her apart. For Stig Magnusson she was the great love of his life. For others she had been an angel. Yes. An angel of death. That was what she was. Because of the decision she and Mons had taken on that fateful August evening in 1982 two people were dead sixteen years later. Mons because of Bjørn Brekkhus’ raging temper; Karin a casual bystander, a victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lea herself had found a new life in one of Sweden’s biggest towns, a safe distance from her origins, an island in Gulen, as far west in Norway as you can go.

We sat there for a while yet, but we didn’t have much more to say. I gave Lea a slightly more detailed description of what had happened between Mons and Bjørn, and I told her about the wind-farm controversy on Brennøy.

‘Wind turbines? Is that such a problem? We’ve got lots of them, on this side of Øresund and the Danish side,’ she said.

When I left they accompanied me to the door, both of them. We said our polite goodbyes. However, she told me not to mention her existence to Kristoffer, Else or indeed anyone. I didn’t think I would tell a living soul about whom I had met in Malmö and what I had discovered. Not everything has to see the light of day. We still have to carry the pain within us, each in our own way.

I hailed a taxi to the harbour and went back home the way I had come: ferry to Copenhagen and taxi to Kastrup Airport. In the tax-free shop I bought a whole bottle of aquavit. Before the plane took off I had already knocked back half of it.

One of the fathers of Nordic Noir, Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway in 1947. He made his debut at the age of twenty-two with
Seasons of Innocence
and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series. He is the author of over twenty titles, which have been published in twenty-four countries and sold over four million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Espen Seim. Staalesen, who has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour), lives in Bergen with his wife. The next instalments in the Varg Veum series –
Where Roses Never Die
and
No One Is So Safe in Danger
– will be published by Orenda Books in 2016 and 2017.

Don Bartlett lives with his family in a village in Norfolk. He completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2000 and has since worked with a wide variety of Danish and Norwegian authors, including Jo Nesbø and Karl Ove Knausgård. He has previously translated
The Consorts of Death
and
Cold Hearts
in the Varg Veum series.