Where Roses Never Die (2 page)

The assignment I received on that Monday in March would perhaps turn out to be the most important I’d ever had, not least for my own sake. It was the first sign of light at the end of a tunnel that was much longer than I cared to admit.

The three years that had passed since Karin died had been like an endless wandering on the seabed. I had seen the most incredible creatures, some of them so frightening I had woken up bathed in sweat every time one appeared in my dreams. Enormous octopuses stretched out their long tentacles towards me, but they never managed to hold on to me. Monstrous monkfish forced me into jagged nooks and crannies, placed a knee on my crotch and emptied my pockets of valuables. Tiny fish floated by enticingly, their tails in the air, but were gone before I had managed to reach out a hand to grab them. A rare sea rose opened for me, drew me in and afterwards extracted its levy in the form of unpleasant after-effects and dwindling self-respect.

It was a life in darkness; I had difficulty seeing clearly down there. The only thing that kept me going was the consolation I found in all the bottles I stumbled over. None of them lay around long enough for green algae to form.

The millennium had passed and Doomsday had not arrived. Nostradamus had been wrong; so had St John and those who still believed in his revelations. Not even the IT experts who had prophesied the Y2K crisis had been proved right. No computer systems collapsed, the world continued on its wayward course with no further changes to our everyday lives, except that we had to write a ‘2’ at the beginning of the year.

As for me, I spent the last days of 1999 delving into a hundred-year-old
murder mystery, and when New Year’s Eve came, like so many other Bergensians, I walked half-way up a mountain in pouring rain and watched the New Year rockets disappear from sight in the low cloud cover, never, it seemed, to return to earth again. Afterwards I trudged down to my flat in Telthussmauet, where I celebrated the arrival of a new millennium in the company of a bottle of aquavit.

The first two years of the new century passed more or less unnoticed, apart from the dramatic events of 11th September 2001 on the eastern seaboard of America. New Year 2002 didn’t seem to be ringing in any great changes either, not in my life nor in the world beyond. It had just become even more burdensome to fly. An old lady with a heart defect and a tube of ointment in her hand luggage would create longer queues at the security check, and if she couldn’t produce ID she was denied access to her plane. Apart from that, most things were the same.

The woman who came to see me that Monday in March was of the gentle sort. She tapped several times on the waiting-room door, then I heard her open it and venture in. I had plenty of time to screw on the top, put the bottle into a desk drawer, drain the glass, rinse it in the sink and place it tidily on the shelf under the mirror, before turning, walking to the door between the waiting room and the office, opening it wide, swaying in the doorway and saying, ‘Yes?’

She met my eyes with trepidation. ‘Are you … Veum?’

I nodded, stepped aside and ushered her in: ‘This way.’

She was about my age, perhaps a bit younger, but I definitely put her in the late fifties. Her hair was lank, and it was some weeks since she had been to the hairdresser’s. The grey was clearly visible at the roots of her hair, in the parting on the left of her head. Her choice of clothing didn’t suggest she was out to make a winning first impression, either. She was wearing a classic, moss-green windproof jacket, brown trousers and flat shoes. The red in her scarf was the only colour to brighten her appearance. In her hand she was carrying a suede bag big enough to contain whatever she might need in terms of everyday accessories. Her skin was pale, her nose small, across the bridge a patch of freckles was just visible, and her face had a sad air about it, which immediately revealed she was
struggling with a problem, perhaps several. But most of the people who came to visit me were. Why else would they come?

She glanced around shyly as she stepped into the office. I held out my hand and introduced myself properly. She told me her name: Maja Misvær.

I directed her to the client’s chair. No one else apart from me had sat there for many weeks. I walked round the desk, slumped down into the swivel chair, unfurled the gentlest expression I could muster and asked: ‘How can I help you?’

She looked at me gloomily, as if the word
help
didn’t exist in her world. I could see my own face in hers, as though I was gazing into a mirror, the way it must have appeared to others over the last three years. Six months after Karin’s death I had walked in the funeral cortege for my old school friend, Paul Finckel. One of my oldest friends, and best sources of information in Bergen’s newspaper world, he had switched off his computer for good, without saving the contents for posterity. A newly employed colleague had taken it over before the corpse was cold. I felt my own demise had edged a step closer, like autumn announcing its arrival one frosty night in September. One by one they were leaving us, my old classmates. Soon there would only be a handful of us left. In the end, there would be none.

‘D-do you remember a little girl called Mette?’

At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about. ‘Mette? I don’t know that I…’

‘She went missing in September 1977.’

Then a light came on. ‘Ah, you mean
that
Mette.’

Two Bergen children had gone missing in the 1970s. Both disappearances had shaken the local community and had initially kept the media busy, before being put on a back burner. In fact, I had helped to solve one of the cases, the 1979 one, some eight years later. The other case had never, to my knowledge, been cleared up. It became known as ‘The Mette Case’.

She nodded.

‘But I don’t quite remember … when was it you said?’

‘17th September 1977.’

I did some swift mental arithmetic: 1987, 1997, 2002. In six months the case would be time-barred, if someone had killed her, that is, and anything else was barely conceivable, bearing in mind how thorough the investigation had been. ‘And Mette, she was…?’

‘Yes, she is my daughter.’

I noted the change of tense. ‘Could you … It’s so long ago … Could you refresh my memory about … the details?’

She heaved a sigh, but nodded assent. ‘I can try. What I remember of it and what … I know.’

The barely three-year-old Mette Misvær disappeared from her home in Solstølvegen in Nordås on Saturday 17th September, in the short space of time between twelve o’clock and a quarter past.

‘I was at home, busy with housework. Mette was sitting in a sandpit right outside the kitchen window. I kept peering out at regular intervals, but when she disappeared I was busy taking clothes out of the washing machine and putting them in the tumble dryer. As soon as I emerged from the laundry room I went to the window to check on Mette…’

When she didn’t see her, at first she wasn’t initially that concerned. The house they lived in formed part of a yard with four other houses, and it was not at all unusual for children to move around this protected area, where cars only came in on very special occasions.

‘I thought that … perhaps some of the children from the other houses were outside playing and Mette had toddled over to join them…’

She leaned over towards the window, but still couldn’t see Mette anywhere. Then she went from the kitchen to the front door and into the yard. She looked everywhere. ‘No children anywhere, neither Mette nor anyone else.’

Then she went to the gate in the wooden fence on to Solstølvegen. The gate was closed. She opened it and walked out. Nothing. In the estate further to the west there were some adults walking around and pointing, and in the street below there were a couple of cars parked. There was nothing else to see.

Then she began to get seriously worried. She ran back into the yard, went to the first house on the left and rang the bell. The husband, Tor Fylling, came to the door. He was on his own. His wife and children had
gone to town. He hadn’t seen Mette. ‘She must be at Else and Eivind’s place,’ he added. ‘Try there.’

She nodded and hurried over to the neighbours’ house. She rang the bell several times, but no one answered. ‘It turned out later that the family had been away for the whole weekend, in their cabin on Holsnøy.’

She ran past the next house. They didn’t have any children. Now there was only one house left, wall to wall with their own. ‘I said to myself – why hadn’t I gone there first? They had Janne, who was the same age as Mette.’

But when the mother opened the door she had Janne in her arms. She listened to Maja with alarm. ‘Mette? No. Yes, I saw her half an hour ago, from the window, she was sitting outside and playing. But … can’t you find her?’

Maja’s neighbour, Randi Hagenberg, became more and more agitated with every question she asked. ‘Have you looked in the garages?’

‘No. I didn’t think of that.’

‘Let’s look now then. I’ll come with you!’ She called to her husband: ‘Nils, can you take Janne?’

Together, they dashed over to the garages, which faced Solstøvegen, east of the five houses. One garage door was open. It belonged to the family who had gone to town. They went inside and scoured the area, but Mette was nowhere to be seen. The other four garage doors were locked. They tried all four handles, but none of them budged.

Now Maja Misvær could feel panic seizing her. Without thinking she ran twenty to thirty metres down the road in one direction, shouting her daughter’s name, stopped to listen, and when she heard nothing, turned round and ran in the opposite direction and repeated the action. ‘All at once I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel my pulse up here, in my throat, and I could hear blood rushing through my body like a … like an echo in my eardrums.’

‘We’ve got to phone the police,’ Randi Hagenberg said.

‘Yes,’ Maja answered as tears flickered in front of her eyes, so suddenly that her vision was affected and she almost lost her balance. She took a few quick steps to the side and supported herself on the fence.

‘But when I looked at the sandpit again … it was then I realised. There was her teddy bear, abandoned in the sand, and, deep down, I knew … she took it everywhere. She would never have left it behind!’

‘No?’

‘No…’

While they waited for the police they ran around the district, calling Mette’s name. Many of the other neighbours came out and assisted with the search. Some went to talk to people on the estate, but no one had seen a little girl.

Someone had contacted Mette’s father, Truls Misvær, who was at a football training session with the older of their two children, six-yearold Håkon. He drove back home as fast as he could. Soon he had joined the others in their increasingly larger circles around the hilly area, looking for the missing girl.

When the police arrived they immediately set up an organised search and radioed information to their colleagues. Not long afterwards the story was on the news:
Small girl missing from her home in Solstøvegen in Nordås.

The police drew a blank. Tiny Mette Misvær was never found.

The investigation escalated over the first few days. From being a straightforward missing-person case it was quickly upgraded to a potential crime. With none of the enquiries bearing fruit and Mette still missing the day after, the system went into overdrive.

All the neighbours were summoned to interviews. None of them had observed anything at all, except for Randi Hagenberg, who was able to confirm that she had seen Mette sitting and playing in the sandpit immediately before she disappeared.

Adults from the estate were also brought in for questioning. A couple of them thought they had seen a car stop outside the gate. But it had been too far away for them to say anything definite about the make of car or any distinguishing characteristics. One of them thought it had been black, another dark grey. A four-door, dark-grey or black saloon was what the police had to go on when they alerted all the patrol cars and gave a description. Nothing came of this search either.

According to the press, everyone on the child sex offender register in Bergen, later in the whole country, had their movements on the day in question charted and recorded, but the results were as unproductive as everything else. The case remained unsolved.

Now that was almost twenty-five years ago. If Mette Misvær had been allowed to grow up she would be a woman of twenty-eight. The likelihood was she was lying in an unmarked grave somewhere, gone for ever.

After Maja had finished talking she sat staring despondently at her lap. She mumbled a word I didn’t catch.

‘What was that?’ I asked carefully.

‘Rose. She was my little rose. But I didn’t pay enough attention and someone picked her.’

‘And now you’d like to…?’

She raised her face and looked me in the eye. ‘I’d like you to find her. I want you to find out what happened. Before it’s too late. Before everyone who might know anything has also gone.’

After a short pause she said: ‘I’d like to show you … where she disappeared.’

‘Do you still live there?’

She nodded. ‘I always think … that I have to be there for when she returns. So that she’ll never have to go round looking for me.’

‘But … I rather think we should wait until tomorrow.’

‘Have you got something else to do?’

‘Yes, today I have.’ I couldn’t tell her the truth. Getting behind a car wheel was simply out of the question. The morning pick-me-up had been too potent. The taste of caraway was still on my tongue.

‘But,’ I added, ‘I can still spend some of today getting my head round the case. Do you remember who you dealt with in the police back then?’

She sighed. ‘It was … we never really got on.’

‘Really?’

‘His name was…’ For the first time she showed something redolent of a smile, but it soon vanished. ‘It was a curious name for such a large man.’

I had a suspicion. ‘And the name was…?’

‘Muus. Inspector Muus.’

Now it was my turn to sigh. ‘You never really got on, you say?’

‘No, he seemed so … brusque, in my opinion. As though it were my fault Mette … People should take better care of their children, he said once.’ She looked into the distance with a sad expression on her face. ‘No, I never did get on with him.’

‘But there must have been others?’

‘Yes, of course. There were many who were very sympathetic. A couple of women officers, amongst others. Cecilie Lyngmo, I think that was the name of one of them.’

‘Yes, I knew both Muus and Cecilie. But they’ve both left the force now.’

‘Yes…’

I had jotted down her address while she was talking. ‘This neighbourhood … Solstølvegen, that’s in Nordås, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, with a view of Nordåsvatnet bay. At that time it was brand new and almost completely isolated. It was Terje Torbeinsvik’s first big project.’ When I didn’t react to the name she added: ‘The architect. I don’t know if you remember. He was married to Vibeke Waaler, the actress.’

‘Yes, I remember her. But she’s in Oslo now, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. They got divorced. She’s at the National Theatre.’

‘And what do you mean by his “first big project”?’

‘It’s called Solstølen Co-op; there are only five houses, around a yard. It was designed as an environmental project; it was supposed to merge into the landscape and be capable of adapting to modern systems, mostly energy-saving ones, as they came on the market. Terje still lives up there and he’s still developing new projects. The next one is aimed at harnessing ground heat – if that means anything to you. With the aid of deep boreholes.’

‘Yes, I’ve read about it. It definitely sounds better than wind turbines.’

‘Even then there was digging going on all around us. And now … now we still have a wonderful location, but the view isn’t quite what it was. New buildings have gone up between us and the water, and in the nature reserve where we searched for Mette there has also been some building.’

‘Are there many people living in the co-op now who were there then?’

‘Yes, most have been happy there despite what happened to Mette. Only one of the houses has changed hands. In several of the others there have been divorces. That’s just the way it was then, in the seventies and eighties.’

I nodded quietly. I had been there myself.

‘And the children have moved out, of course. Now there are only children in two of the houses.’

‘Does that mean …? What about you? You and your husband?’

‘Yes, we … Two years after Mette went missing we split up. It was simply too much to bear. Håkon stayed with Truls. I would have been happy to look after him, but … all I thought about was Mette. It was as though I couldn’t concentrate on any other children except her. Anyway, Håkon and Truls had so much in common. Football. Håkon even played for FC Brann for a few seasons.’

‘I see.’ I tried to recall his name in a football context, but couldn’t.

‘Afterwards I lived alone.’ She said this in a way that suggested it hadn’t been a loss, more the confirmation of a fact.

‘So you haven’t met anyone?’

‘No.’

‘And what’s your relationship with … your ex-husband and his family? Håkon?’

She hesitated. ‘Håkon came to see me regularly, of course, but … He’s alone too, even though he’s over thirty now. And he’s moved away. I haven’t spoken to Truls for several years. He…’

‘Yes?’

‘He could never forgive me. After all, I was supposed to be looking after her. It was as though he blamed me for all that happened.’

‘I understand.’

‘And he was right of course! It was my fault. If you had any idea how many years afterwards I went out searching for her…’

‘You mean…’

‘Yes, I couldn’t sit still in the evening, I had to go out and look, even if it was absolutely pointless. As though she had only got lost and stayed away for two or three years. But I couldn’t control it. My grief was so immense, my agitation so unmanageable that it’s marked the rest of my life, every single day, every single night.’

I looked at her. There was something genuinely desperate about her features, something that reflected what she told me so much more clearly than the words she used: the dreadful experience the little mite’s disappearance must have been … and for her never to re-appear.

I considered my options. ‘Would you say there’s any point me talking to the others who lived in the co-op when Mette went missing?’

She gave me a blank look. ‘The police were so thorough. There was no reason to believe…’ Suddenly she clutched at her throat and coughed, as though there was something stuck. ‘I mean … how could any of them … we were such a tight-knit group.’

‘Would it be OK if I went out to see you tomorrow?’

She nodded.

‘In which case, would you mind making me a list of the people who lived there then? I mean … as some of the families have broken up … If I’m going to talk to them I’ll try to get in touch with as many as possible.’

‘Alright, I’ll do my best. I mean … yes, I’ll do that. It’s not that difficult.’

‘OK.’ I got up.

She didn’t move. ‘I was wondering if…’

‘Yes?’

‘How much will this cost?’

I pulled out a drawer from the desk and passed her a sheet of paper. ‘This is a list of my charges. It might look a bit overwhelming, but once I’ve started, I work efficiently and … there may be a discount.’

She perused the sheet and folded it without a further word. She was, like me, prepared for the worst. At least that was some comfort. She didn’t have great expectations, either.

She stood up, and it struck me that I hadn’t offered her anything to drink. I was a bad host these days.

‘So you’ll come tomorrow?’

I nodded. ‘Around ten, is that convenient?’

She said yes and I accompanied her to the door. That was as far as my social graces stretched now.

I went back into my office, reached for the beaker on the shelf, opened the lowest desk drawer to the left, took out the bottle and filled the glass half-full. The aquavit was clear and shiny, like tears emanating from a deep well. There was more where that came from.

I toasted an imaginary adversary. Dankert Muus, of all people. The inspector who had hoped to see me again in hell now would have to see me alive. I didn’t ring to warn him I was coming. That would have been too much of a risk.