What is Mine (25 page)

Sigmund Berli stared in disbelief at the photograph of the nine-year-old.

“I would want to know. Shit, if Sture and Snorre are not mine, then . . .”

“Then what? Then you wouldn’t want them?”

Berli snapped his mouth shut, audibly. The snap made Adam laugh, a dry laugh.

“Forget it, Sigmund. What’s important is to find out whether the information is relevant to us. For the investigation.”

“And why should it be?” he asked, unfocused.

Snorre was dark like Sigmund Berli. Square. Like peas in a pod, people used to say. And even though he wasn’t usually much good at things like that, even he could see clear similarities between his son now and pictures of himself as a five-year-old.

“Obviously, I’ve got no idea! Get a grip.”

Adam snapped his fingers in front of Sigmund’s face.

“The first thing we should find out is if the same applies to any of the others.”

“You mean whether the other children are in fact their fathers’ children? And we should check that just before the funeral, knock on the door and say excuse me, kind sir, but we have reason to believe that you are not the father of the child you just lost, so please can we have a blood sample? Well?
Well? Is that what you mean?
”

“What’s wrong with you?”

Adam’s voice was quiet and calm. Sigmund Berli normally envied him that, his older colleague’s ability to control himself, to think clearly at all times, to talk precisely. But now Berli was furious.

“Damn it, Adam! Have you thought of putting the last nail in the coffin for these men or what?”

“No. I thought we would do it discreetly.
Very
discreetly. I don’t want Tønnes Selbu getting wind of what we’re talking about right now. And as for the other fathers, it’s your job to come up with something, to make taking a blood test seem natural. Pronto.”

Sigmund Berli drew a deep breath. Then he put his fingertips together and twiddled his thumbs.

“Any ideas?”

“No. That’s your problem.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sure,” Adam started, in a conciliatory tone, like a father holding out his hand to an unreasonable son. “No, let’s put it another way: There are two things we have to find out as soon as possible. One is whether the children are their fathers’ children. The other is . . .”

Sigmund Berli stood up.

“I’m not finished,” said Adam.

“Well, hurry up and finish then, because I’ve got plenty to do.”

“We have to find out how Kim and Sarah died.”

“The doctors say they don’t know.”

“Well, then they will have to look more closely. Run new tests. I don’t know. But we have to know what the children died from and we have to know if they have an unknown father out there.”

“Unknown father?”

Sigmund Berli was calmer now. He had unclenched his fists and was breathing more freely.

“You mean that these children might be . . . half brothers and sisters?”

“I don’t mean anything,” said Adam Stubo. “You’ll have to find some way of getting the tests run. Good luck.”

Sigmund Berli said something under his breath. Adam Stubo was sensible enough not to ask what it was. Sigmund sometimes said things he didn’t mean. That is, once they had been said. And Adam knew very well what his colleague was thinking. Sigmund Berli’s oldest son was a fair and slight boy. His mother through and through, he used to say to himself with barely disguised pride.

When the door shut behind Sigmund, Adam Stubo dialled Johanne’s number at work. There was no reply. He let it ring for a long time, to no avail. Then he tried her at home. She wasn’t there either, and he discovered that he was annoyed that he didn’t know where she was.

T
HIRTY-NINE

T
he building was obviously from the postwar period. The fifties perhaps. A square building with four apartments, no doubt with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. The area was relatively big; lack of space was not a problem for small towns in Norway after World War II. The building had recently been renovated. The walls were painted with thick yellow paint and the roof tiles looked new. Johanne parked on the road, right outside the gate. The fence was also newly painted; the green paint so shiny that she wondered if it was still wet.

It smelled of small town.

The sound of a car, a jumble of voices from a kindergarten behind a high fence, hammering from a construction site across the road, the carpenters slinging obscenities at one another, a sudden peal of female laughter from an open window. The sounds of a small town. The smell of someone baking bread. The feeling that she was being watched as she walked up to the porch by the front door, without knowing who was watching, what they were thinking or whether they were thinking anything other than “Here comes a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong here.”

Johanne had been born and raised in Oslo. She knew very little about small towns and admitted it freely. All the same, there was something about places like this that appealed to her. They were manageable. Transparent. The feeling of being part of something that is not too big and unpredictable. She had often thought recently that with modern technology, she didn’t need to live in Oslo anymore. She could move away, move to the country, to a small village with five shops and a garage, a dilapidated café and a bus station, cheap housing and a school for Kristiane with only fifteen pupils in each class. But of course she couldn’t, not with Isak and her parents in town, not with Kristiane, who needed people around her all the time. But it had crossed her mind. She could feel the eyes trained on her from the first floor of the yellow building, from the bay window in the villa across the road, eyes that watched from behind the blinds and curtains; she had been noticed and was being watched, and the thought made her feel bizarrely safe.

“Lillestrøm. Jesus. Here I am romanticizing about Lillestrøm.”

The housing cooperative’s maintenance fund had obviously run dry when they got to the doorbells. They were hanging from the wall, speckled with yellow paint. Johanne tried to press one of the bells. She had to hold the plate with one hand and press with the other. She heard a horrible ringing sound somewhere in the distance. No one reacted, so she pushed the next one. The lady on the first floor, who had been watching her from the kitchen window, unaware that she was visible from the driveway, stuck her head out.

“Hello?”

“Hi. My name’s Johanne Vik. I wanted to . . .”

“Wait a moment!”

The woman padded down the stairs. She smiled expectantly at Johanne as she opened the door a crack.

“What can I do for you?”

“My name is Johanne Vik. I work at Oslo University and I’m looking for someone who might know what happened to a lady who lived here before. Many years ago, to be honest.”

“Oh?”

The woman was well over sixty. Her hair was covered with a chiffon scarf. Johanne could see big blue and green hair rollers under the bluish green semitransparent material.

“I moved here in 1967,” she said, without showing any sign of letting Johanne in, “so maybe I can help. Who is it you’re looking for?”

“Agnes Mohaug,” said Johanne.

“She’s dead,” said the woman, smiling broadly, as if she was happy to be able to give this information. “She died the year I moved in. Just after, in fact. She lived there.”

The woman lifted her hand lazily. Johanne assumed she was pointing at the ground floor to the left.

“Did you know her?”

The woman laughed. The roots of her teeth flashed gray against unhealthy pink gums.

“I don’t think there was anyone who knew Agnes Mohaug. She’d lived in the house since it was built. In 1951, I think it was. But still there was no one who really . . . She had a son. Did you know that?”

“Yes. I’m looking . . .”

“A . . .
a simpleton
, if you know what I mean. Not that I knew him; he’s dead as well.”

She laughed again, hoarse and hearty, as if she found the extinction of the little Mohaug family immensely funny.

“He wasn’t quite right, so they say. Not right at all. But Agnes Mohaug herself . . . no one said a word against her. Kept to herself, always. Sad story, about the boy . . .”

The woman broke off.

“The boy who what?” asked Johanne, carefully.

“No . . .”

She thought about it. Then she quickly patted her rollers.

“It was such a long time ago. And I don’t remember Mrs. Mohaug that well. She died only a few months after I’d moved in. Her son had been dead for years. A long time, at least.”

“I see.”

“But . . .”

The woman lightened up. Again she smiled, so that her narrow face looked like it would split in two.

“Go and ask Hansvold in Number 44. Over there!”

She waved in the direction of a green twin building that was a few hundred yards away, separated from Number 45 by a big lawn and hip-high metal fence.

“Hansvold has lived here longest. He must be over eighty, but he’s clear as a bell. If you hold on a moment, I’d be happy to take you over and introduce you . . .”

She leaned forward to whisper, without opening the door any wider.

“. . . after all, I know you now. Just one moment.”

“Don’t worry, that’s really not necessary,” said Johanne quickly. “I’ll manage myself. But thank you very much for your help. Thank you.”

Johanne started to stride toward the gate, so that the woman with the chiffon scarf would not have time to change. A child screamed loudly in the kindergarten. The carpenter on the scaffolding over the road swore loudly and threatened to sue a man in a suit who was waving his arms and pointing at a cement mixer that had fallen over. A car rolled over a speed bump as Johanne came out onto the road; she jumped and stepped in a puddle.

The small town was already starting to lose some of its charm.

“But I’m still not entirely clear why you want to know all this.”

Harald Hansvold knocked his pipe against a large crystal ashtray. A fine shower of burned tobacco sprinkled over the sparkly surface. The old, well-dressed man obviously had problems with his eyesight. A matte gray film blurred the edges of one of his pupils and he had given up using glasses. Johanne suspected that he only saw shadows around him. He had let her, a complete stranger, get some sparkling apple juice and cookies from the kitchen. Otherwise he seemed healthy; his hands were steady when he refilled his pipe with fresh tobacco. His voice was calm and he had no problem remembering Agnes Mohaug, the neighbor with the less than fortunate son, as he chose to put it.

“He was easily led astray. That was the main problem, as I remember. Of course, it wasn’t easy for him to make friends. Real friends, I mean. You have to remember that times were very different then . . . people’s tolerance of others was different . . .”

He gave a tight smile.

“. . . not like it is now.”

Johanne didn’t know whether the man was trying to be ironic. She had a pain in her chest and took a large gulp of the apple juice. It was far too sweet, and in a fluster she let most of it run out her mouth again and back into the glass.

“Anders was not a bad boy,” Hansvold continued, not noticing. “My wife used to invite him in every now and then. It worried me sometimes. I was away a lot, travelling. I’m a retired train driver.”

The fact that Harald Hansvold was so consistently polite was perhaps not so strange, given his age. But there was something unexpectedly refined about the old man and his apartment, with books from floor to ceiling and three modern lithographs on the walls. Somehow it didn’t jive with a lifelong career in the state railways. Afraid that her prejudices would be too obvious, Johanne nodded eagerly to show interest, as if being a train driver was something she had always wanted to know more about.

“When he was very young, it wasn’t a problem of course. But when he reached puberty . . . he grew to be a big man. Good-looking chap. But, you know . . .”

He made a telling movement with his finger at his temple.

“And then there was that Asbjørn Revheim.”

“Asbjørn Revheim?”