Where Roses Never Die (23 page)

Jesper Janevik started to close the door the moment he recognised me on the step, but I was as fast with my foot as I had been on the previous occasion and placed it in the door opening. He stared at it, furious, as if intending to push it off, but from his mouth came only a deep groan of despair.

‘Janevik … This time we have to have a proper conversation. Let me in!’

‘We had one last time, didn’t we? Stop harassing me!’

‘We didn’t talk enough. There have been some fresh developments since then.’

We stood staring at each other. He was wearing the same dark-blue jeans as before, or at least the same brand, but his shirt was white and his vest, visible at the neck, black. There was a silvery glitter in his dark hair and his eyes were shiny and feverish. He looked as if he had slept badly since I last visited him, in which case it was not without good reason.

‘It’s too cold to stand outside. Either you let me in or I’ll ring the police and ask them to get a search warrant.’ I looked around and motioned towards the flowerbeds around his house. ‘They’ll dig up every bloody bed you’ve got!’

‘No!’ he whimpered, as though this was the worst calamity that could befall him. ‘Not that, please! Come in then, if you absolutely have to.’

He hung back in the dark hallway. I pushed the door and followed him in. The air inside was cold and the morning light from outside showed me the way. He pointed to an open door, which led into a rather old-fashioned sitting room, in which the flower pots on the windowsill were the sole sign of life. A radio cabinet from the 1950s and a television
from the 1970s, an inheritance from his parents, judging by the sight of them, occupied one wall and a corner. An empty coffee table, a sofa and three chairs, upholstered in the same grey-brown material with red patches under the arm rests, made up the remainder of the furniture. On the cabinet was the same photograph I had seen in his niece’s house four days earlier: the father and mother in front of a dark Fiat, both well advanced in years, but proud of their new acquisition, which they would keep for the rest of their of their lives and then leave to their heirs.

I walked over, picked up the photo and held it in the air. ‘Your father was proud of this car, Liv Grethe told me when I visited her and your sister, last Thursday.’

He glanced at the picture, then back at me. ‘Yes.’

‘You must have driven it yourself now and then?’

‘No, never. It was Dad’s.’

‘Yes, but Liv Grethe said … After your father died it just stood in the garage. Your mother didn’t drive. I suppose you do, though?’

He shrugged and nodded. ‘Yes…’

‘Don’t say you never borrowed it.’

He squirmed. ‘Once in a blue moon maybe.’

‘Like that Saturday in September 1977, for example?’

‘That Sat—’ He kept blinking as if I was blowing at him, hard. ‘No, no! What are you after …? Are you accusing me of …? Do you think I…?’ Tears were in his eyes, so big and shiny they were like oil.

I persisted: ‘That Saturday in September 1977, when you drove up to Solstølen and took little Mette, whom you knew after you saved her from an incident in the woods earlier that summer.’

He stared at me in silence.

‘You parked in the street. You saw her alone in the sandpit playing. Probably you called her from the gate, showed her a bar of chocolate and asked if she wanted some … When she went over you gave it to her, lifted her up, carried her to the car and asked if she felt like a trip, that would be more fun than sitting along and digging sand, wouldn’t it? And of course she thought so too?’

His face contorted, twitched, more violently and uncontrolled than
before, as though he were on the verge of some kind of stroke. He was breathing hard, but chewed his lip so as not to let out the smallest sound.

‘Isn’t that true? Give or take a detail? Wasn’t that how it happened?’

‘No! Not like that…’

‘How then?’

Again he stood staring at me. I could read in his eyes that it was only now he realised what he had said. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘You didn’t mean to do it?’

‘To say … what I said.’

‘But now you have.’

At once he burst into tears. He slumped down on the nearest chair, covered his face with his hands and sobbed loudly and painfully as his whole body quivered and shook. It was like watching a little child that has fallen and hurt themselves. But I had to remind myself – what had happened to the little child we were discussing was far worse.

With mixed feelings – sympathy and cold distance – I watched him, I didn’t say a word, I didn‘t move. I just waited, as so often before, when I knew a breakthrough was imminent.

In the end his crying subsided. He was sitting hunched up in the chair, but lowered his arms and looked at me with the eyes of a wounded animal. ‘I knew it! Knew I would be blamed yet again for something I haven’t done.’

‘I—’

‘First the damned girls. Then the police. Then that dreadful policeman in 1977 – Dankert Muus. I still wake up in the night and see him before me. He was evil … evil!’

‘That may be a little exagg—’

‘And then you come along, twenty-five years later, with the same accusations.’ He hiccoughed and drew a deep breath. ‘That isn’t how it was. I’ve never been … like that. It wasn’t my fault she drowned.’

This went through me like a sliver of ice. ‘Did she drown? Mette?’

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘Mette? I’m not talking about Mette!’

‘Who then?’

‘Liv Grethe, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Liv Grethe?’

‘I told her when I went to make coffee that she had to keep an eye on her all the time. But she just lay there, half-naked in the sun. She was desperate for a tan. And then she fell asleep – or dozed off – or whatever it was that happened.’

‘And now you’re talking about … your sister?’

‘Maria, yes. And when I returned with a jug of coffee, Liv Grethe wasn’t anywhere to be seen.’

Before he had gone off she had been sitting and playing at the edge of the water. Her little blue bucket and red spade were still there, but she…

‘Maria! What are you thinking of? Where’s Liv Grethe?’

She had given a start, pushed her sunglasses up on to her head and looked around, befuddled. ‘What? But she was here!’

‘Well, she isn’t now. She’s gone.’

They had desperately searched everywhere. He had run over to the water, but the waves were washing in and out and the sea quickly became deep. He threw himself in, swam out, dived down, opened his eyes, looked around, paddled back up to the surface, took a deep breath and dived back down. It was only after – how long? he was never quite sure – fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes that he found her, at the bottom in her tiny swimming trunks, her hair floating up with the water, her mouth and eyes open, the pupils had long disappeared behind her eyelids. A little mermaid.

He swam down to her, so deep that his blood pounded like timpani in his head and his eardrums hurt, but he managed to get hold of her, grab her arm and pull her up, drag her shore-wards until he felt firm ground under his feet, stood up and waded back with the lifeless bundle in his arms, staring at his mother, his sister standing there, her stupid, pained face, stiffened into a grimace that would soon crack, soon dissolve into a thousand pieces, never to be the same face again, with a slow-working poison in her soul and brain that would leave its marks for the rest of her life.

‘She was dead, you see? We did all we could, but there was no life left in her. And that was when Maria realised, when she broke down. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so desperate. Desperate? Hysterical! She howled and screamed, pummelled my chest and said it was my fault, everything was my fault! Now she had lost everything, first of all her husband, then her daughter, now she had nothing left to live for, she might as well jump into the sea herself. I had to restrain her, I had to hold her so tightly my nails were gouging her skin, but she kept hitting me –
your fault, Jesper, your fault, Jesper!
And then I said … Well, then, I told her.’

He paused. He stared at me blindly. He had been so deep into his narrative that he was finding it difficult to return to the present. His head sank further and he sat studying his hands, which opened and closed, opened and closed.

‘So then you told her…’ I repeated.

He nodded mutely.

‘What did you tell her, Jesper?’

He shook his head and refused to say.

So I said it for him. ‘You said you’d find another little girl for her, didn’t you.’

‘Yes.’

I didn’t dare leave him while we waited for the police. Now everything was out in the open a new composure came over him, as though this was what he had been yearning for all these years: finally to be able to tell the truth about what really happened on that September day in 1977.

As soon as he had promised her, he knew at once what he would do. First he had taken Maria into the house, given her several Valium tablets from a bottle she’d been prescribed and laid her down on the sofa in the sitting room with a woollen blanket wrapped round her. She fell asleep almost at once.

‘And the body, what did you do with that?’

The next thing to do was to go back down to the beach, take the drowned child to her house, and, after a quick think, bury her. The rose bed facing the north-east was the nicest spot. With a spade he buried her deep, moved the rose bushes to the side, wrapped Liv Grethe in a blanket and placed her in the deep grave. For a moment he stood with bowed head looking down at the round bundle. Then he picked a pale-red rose from the nearest bush, held it to his nose and smelled the bewitching perfume, and dropped it onto the tartan plaid. Then he shovelled the soil back in, placed the rose bushes over her and it wasn’t long before everything was as it had been. No one could see a difference.

‘And she’s still there?’

He nodded slowly. ‘It’s the most beautiful rose bed of them all.’

We sat in silence, both of us, as the unreality of the situation gradually sank in.

I was the first to speak. ‘And then…?’

‘This was a Friday…’

He had checked his watch. It was too late now, but the day after … He spent the evening with Maria, sitting in the armchair next to the sofa, where she lay as if in a coma, with the television on, but not the volume, so as not to wake her up.

She opened her eyes a couple of times, looked around, met his gaze and asked in a daze: ‘Liv Grethe?’

‘She’s asleep.’

She was satisfied with that answer and soon went back to sleep.

The following day he drove the car out of the garage for the first time in many months, got behind the wheel, filled up with petrol in Florvåg before driving down to the terminal in Kleppestø and waiting for the ferry to dock. During the crossing he stood on deck. It was a beautiful day with a few scattered showers, sunny intervals and late-summer temperatures, although it was mid-September. Inside, he felt a strange calm; everything was predestined, somewhere it was written in the stars that this is what he would do.

In Solstølvegen he parked the car outside the fence, sat for a moment and deliberated, then he got out of the car. When he reached the gate it struck him once again. This was no mere chance. This was how it was meant to be. She was in the sandpit – alone. And there wasn’t anyone to be seen in the yard between the five houses. No one else but her.

He took a bar of chocolate from his inside pocket, held it in the air and said: ‘Mette! Look what I’ve got for you…’

The little girl looked up, recognised him at once, got up so quickly she knocked over the blue bucket she was filling and ran towards him smiling. ‘Hi!’

He broke off a bit of chocolate for her. She took it and put it in her mouth in one movement while beaming up at him.

‘Look what I’ve got for you today, Mette … My new car.’

She stretched her neck to look over the gate, nodding happily. He scanned the houses, from one to the next, window to window. Not a sign of life, not even in the house where she belonged. Then he quickly leaned over, lifted her up, held her away from his body and said: ‘Do you feel like a little trip with Uncle Jesper?’

‘Uncle Jesper,’ she answered, and nodded. ‘Are you my uncle too?’

‘I certainly am. Come on!’

He whisked her off to his car, opened the door on the left, placed her on the front seat without fastening her seat belt, ran round the car, got in behind the wheel, twisted the ignition key and started up.

It had been so easy. That was all there was to it.

He drove carefully so that she wouldn’t tumble forward if he had to brake suddenly. On board the ferry he sat in the car and gave her chocolate, got out to pay the ticket collector and then got back in, happy that he hadn’t met anyone he knew. But who could that be? Who did he have anything to do with anymore on Askøy? And on a Saturday morning most people were going the other way, to Bergen; and those travelling this way were not Askøy residents but Bergensians on a day trip, maybe to do some fishing on the island of Herdla or out towards Hjeltefjorden.

He drove ashore, unnoticed, and continued to Janevika, equally unnoticed, where he put the car straight into the garage and parked it for good. He had never used it again and a few years later he sold it for no great profit.

During the trip Mette changed. At first she had been trusting and enthusiastic. When they arrived at the ferry she suddenly looked serious, as though she realised that now something was happening which she didn’t understand. But when he consoled her with more chocolate she relaxed again – for the time being. When they arrived her lips started trembling. ‘Where’s Mummy? I want my mummy!’

At first he didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Mummy’s gone away, Mette. Now you’re living with Uncle Jesper and … a new mummy. We’ll make sure the nasty boy won’t come and take you.’

She looked up at him, puzzled. Then she started to cry. ‘Mummy! I want my mummy!’

‘Come here, Mette. In here, you’ll see. A nice lady’s waiting for you…’

He lifted her up and carried her kicking into the house. Inside, Maria struggled to her feet and staggered around. ‘Maria,’ he said. ‘Here I am with a new Liv Grethe for you … Look!’

He put the girl down on the floor in front of him. She stared at Maria. Then she threw herself round and clung to his leg. ‘I want my mummy, my mummy, my mummy!’

Maria stood watching her, not understanding much more herself. ‘Liv Grethe, is it really you?’

From that moment on they never called her anything but Liv Grethe. The first nights she cried herself to sleep, sobbing inconsolably, which changed into resigned sniffling. When they woke her in the morning she was startled, sat up in bed and looked round, disorientated, she had no idea where she was. But as the weeks went by she seemed to adapt to the situation. Gradually a kind of resigned calm fell over her, as though realising that her mum and dad and Håkon were gone forever, they had left her and would never come back. She began to forget them, there were longer and longer intervals between her asking after them, and in the end it was as though she had repressed her previous existence and had become … Liv Grethe.

The house was isolated, hidden behind a tall hedge, and everyone knew Maria had brought her daughter with her from Østland. The bitterness of her marital break-up had meant Maria never sought contact with old friends, and from now on it was him or the mother who took care of the practical side, went shopping, that kind of thing. Later it was just him. No one reacted to the sounds of a child playing in the house. When, four years later, she started school, it was with Liv Grethe’s birth certificate as her ID, and no one looked at that more than once. He didn’t talk to Maria anymore about the past. He was never entirely sure if she had ever really understood that in fact she had a new daughter. But then he didn’t really understand women.

The day he would never forget was the Thursday, barely two weeks after he had been up to Solstøvegen to collect her, when two police officers suddenly appeared on his doorstep on what they called a routine patrol. After a detailed discussion with him and conferring with the officers in charge of the investigation in Bergen they took him to Police HQ, where he was confronted by Inspector Dankert Muus, who wanted to talk about his many visits to Synnøve in Solstølvegen, and
not only that, Muus also brought up old cases from Askøy. It all ended with him being in custody for twenty-four hours before the defence lawyer he had been allocated had him released, as there wasn’t a scrap of evidence against him; even the circumstantial evidence was thin. Later Maria was also summoned to an interview, although they got nothing sensible out of her, and he had given the defence lawyer photos of Liv Grethe, Maria and him, taken on her birthday the year before, the 17th September, as a kind of alibi for the same date the year afterwards. It was accepted because he never heard any more. Life continued as usual. The daily drama carried on. Except that one of the characters had been exchanged.

He met my gaze again. ‘She became like a daughter to me, Veum. Maria was never the same again. Something had gone for ever inside her. It was me who took care of Liv Grethe, helped her with her homework, gave her advice and accompanied her to school and so on. And I was a decent father. I never did anything to her. I did nothing wrong!’

‘No? All you did was destroy a family, leave a mother, father and brother in total darkness, never knowing what had happened to their daughter and sister. All you did was steal a child.’

The look he gave me was dark and unfathomable. He didn’t know what I was talking about. He hadn’t done anything wrong.