What Dark Clouds Hide Page 12

  Henrik nodded and mumbled a yes. He had no idea what Ellen Mohr did. In any case, he had not realized that she stayed at home.

  ‘A bit odd,’ he said. ‘Staying at home when you’ve got only one child, who’s at school from perhaps half past eight until—’

  ‘Quarter to nine,’ she corrected him. ‘School finishes at different times every day, but it’s true that the after-school activities last until quarter to five, yes. Sander almost always attended those.’

  ‘So Sander was away from home in the period from...maybe half past eight, given the short walking distance, until...five o’clock? For eight and a half hours every day. And Ellen stays at home? That’s not very modern, is it? Not to say very strange.’

  Haldis Grande looked at him with a reproachful expression that made him cringe, quite literally. He drew in his arms, clenched his elbows into his sides and lowered his eyes. Her grasp tightened on her teacup and she sniffed the misty vapour before she answered: ‘I don’t think either you or I are entitled to an opinion on that. People must arrange their lives as they please. And in any case, what is absolutely certain is that she did everything in her power to make schooldays as positive as possible for her son.’

  Haldis Grande obviously did not hold grudges. Once again she was smiling with her whole being.

  ‘And that’s something he certainly enjoyed! Despite his poor academic results.’

  Henrik Holme flicked repeatedly through the blank pages of his notebook.

  ‘What about injuries?’ he asked all of a sudden.

  ‘Injuries? Children sustain minor bumps and bruises all the time at school. They take a tumble downstairs and get involved in scuffles. They fall on the ice in winter and graze their knees on the gravel in spring. A big box of Elastoplast and a great store of hugs are just as important a part of a primary schoolteacher’s equipment as alphabet books.’

  ‘But Sander, was he more prone than the others?’

  ‘No,’ she said adamantly. ‘I wouldn’t say that. At least not when I compare him to the most boisterous of the other boys. I can think of only one time in the past two years when we’ve had to summon his parents.’

  ‘Oh? What was that about?’

  Her eyes became two narrow lines in her round face as she made an effort to concentrate.

  ‘It must have been just before Christmas. Last year, anyway. The youngsters had made a sledging hill behind the school. A mild spell put it out of use for a couple of days, before it froze over again. The hill became a sheet of ice. The janitor closed off the area with a few vaulting horses and some red tape. It was to no avail, as you can imagine. Some of the boys broke through the barrier and the outcome was just as you might expect. Sander hit the fence at full speed, was knocked unconscious and got a nasty cut above his eye.’

  ‘And was picked up afterwards?’

  ‘Yes. Ellen was on the spot only ten minutes or so later. Sander came back to school the next day with three stitches under a big bandage.’

  ‘The very next day, as soon as that? If he was unconscious, doesn’t that mean he had concussion? Shouldn’t he have been kept at home to rest for a few days?’

  For the first time Haldis Grande seemed unsure. A line crossed her silky-smooth forehead and her mouth puckered pensively.

  ‘It was his father who brought him that day,’ she said slowly. ‘He was waiting for me when I arrived, and said something about Sander having to be kept indoors during break-time for two or three days. That’s normally not on, but since Sander has his own assistant, we were able to—’

  ‘Jon came with him,’ Henrik Holme broke in. ‘Did that happen often?’

  ‘That he was accompanied? All the children are accompanied to—’

  ‘By Jon. Was it usual for Jon to accompany him?’

  ‘No... Well, the children are often already in the cloakroom when the teachers arrive in the classroom, so it’s not so easy to see who brings them. The parents have already left. My impression is that it’s Ellen who brings and collects. In the main.’

  It was too warm in the room, despite the windows being open a crack. Henrik Holme was perspiring and the coarse woollen fabric of the armchair was making him itchy through his trouser legs.

  ‘Was he off school much?’

  ‘No, certainly not. I can’t recall a...’

  As she used her left hand to smoothe her shoulder-length grey-blonde hair behind her ear, Henrik noticed that she even had dimples on her hands.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, clearly taken aback. ‘I don’t think Sander has been absent from school a single day, you know! I can check that, of course, because we keep records and gather statistics.’

  ‘Mm,’ Henrik nodded, uninterested. ‘But...’

  The itch had spread to his whole body.

  ‘You’re on the wrong track,’ Haldis Grande said gravely. ‘Sander’s parents were exemplary. Admittedly, Sander frequently came to school with sticking plasters, bandages and bruises. His arm in a sling a couple of times, too. But that’s what he was like, Sander. A big strong boy with ADHD and a great urge to be active. His death was an accident. But this terrorist attack and...’

  Her small, narrow eyes moistened.

  ‘With these terrible events, you’d think the police would have enough to do, to be honest.’

  ‘We do,’ Henrik muttered. ‘But I still haven’t quite understood this.’

  ‘What is it you don’t understand?’ she demanded, a touch impatient. ‘I think I’ve now said all I can say about Sander.’

  ‘You just said that he was often injured.’

  ‘No! I said that he did not injure himself any more often than other boys!’

  ‘Not at school, no. But you said that he often came to school with injuries.’

  Now she did not say a word. A faint blush spread over her face. She blinked repeatedly and raised her teacup to her mouth. It was almost empty, but that did not prevent her from placing the rim against her lips and making a slurping noise, before replacing it slowly on the saucer.

  ‘He did have this condition,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘Children of that age usually go to bed about half past eight or nine o’clock,’ Henrik Holme said distractedly, directing his gaze at the window. ‘We’ve already ascertained that he’s on the school premises for eight and a half hours every day. There, he plays with other youngsters at every single break, and probably all the time during the extracurricular period.’

  ‘After-school activities,’ Haldis Grande corrected him.

  ‘He doesn’t injure himself any more than other youngsters at these times,’ he continued, not letting his attention be diverted. ‘Whereas at home, under the supervision of his parents, he spends three and a half hours or so, before he goes to bed. There he sustains injuries.’

  Now he looked Sander’s teacher straight in the eye.

  ‘There he breaks his arm, and there he gets bruises.’

  Haldis Grande leaned forward across the table with great difficulty. When she poured more tea into both their cups, he noticed that she too had started to perspire. The scent of lily-of-the-valley had become unpleasantly strong, almost rank, and her moon-face was glistening.

  ‘I haven’t given it that much thought,’ she said finally, when he would not drop eye-contact. ‘I’ve quite simply not seen it that way.’

  ‘Did you ever ask him?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how he had hurt himself?’

  ‘No... Well, I suppose so, of course I did, sometimes, but...’

  ‘What was his answer, then?’

  ‘Different things,’ she said falteringly. ‘Sometimes he would take the opportunity on Mondays, in the morning when each of the pupils was asked to name one thing they had done over the weekend, to explain in great detail about some moderately dramatic incident or another. At other times...’

  A huge ginger tabby cat came creeping across the floor. Around its head it wore a plastic cone that waggled with every
step. When it reached the settee, it shot the policeman an icy-blue look, before softly and nimbly hopping on to its owner’s lap. It did not appear to be ill at all, but along one side a rectangular patch of around ten centimetres was shaved smooth and partly covered with sticking plaster. Its eyes half-closed, the cat settled comfortably, glowering at the visitor. Haldis Grande began to stroke its back. For a while the noise of the cat purring was the only sound to be heard.

  Henrik Holme put a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat.

  ‘Other times?’ he prompted her.

  ‘Other times he just brushed it all off.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How did he brush it off? What did he say?’

  ‘Well... “Nothing really,” he would say. Something like that. “Only trivial” – I think that was how he put it.’

  ‘Did he call a fractured arm “only trivial”?’

  ‘What arm fracture?’

  ‘He broke his right arm in April.’

  The information was one of the few scraps he had gleaned from the boy’s grandmother before she lost her temper and threw him out the previous day.

  ‘Yes,’ Haldis Grande said, drawing it out. ‘That’s right enough, yes.’

  ‘What did Sander say about that?’

  ‘No, I can’t really remember. He was more interested in getting everyone to sign his plaster cast.’

  ‘Try,’ Henrik said softly. ‘Try to remember.’

  ‘I just can’t recall what he said.’

  ‘Do you think that might be because he didn’t say anything at all?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If he had told you what had happened, it would have involved some kind of drama, don’t you think? Then it would have stuck in your mind, would it not?’

  Haldis Grande did not reply. The cat stood up on her lap and arched its back, with a protracted yawn, before jumping down to the floor.

  ‘It can’t be so very often that children break their arm,’ the police officer pressed on. ‘To me, it seems strange that you don’t remember something so dramatic, about three months later. If Sander didn’t just brush it all off, at the time. As...“only trivial”, wasn’t that what he used to say?’

  Still she did not respond. Her long, royal-blue sweater was covered in cat hairs, and she absent-mindedly used both hands to sweep them off.

  ‘Or what?’ Henrik said encouragingly when the silence grew painfully long.

  Eventually, laying her hands placidly on her lap, she looked up.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said softly. ‘You could be right.’

  ‘I think perhaps I am,’ he said, nodding. ‘And now I’ll leave you in peace.’

  He got to his feet and Haldis Grande scrambled up off the settee.

  ‘But I still don’t think you’re right about your suspicions,’ she added as she followed him out to the hallway. ‘If you had seen him with his parents, then there’s no way you would suspect that anything whatsoever was wrong. It’s all a dreadful tragedy, of course, but it’s absolutely impossible to imagine that Sander was exposed to any—’

  Gasping for breath, she shook her head instead of completing her sentence. The heat had drawn a wet moustache above her full lips. Henrik Holme stuffed the blank notebook and unused pen into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, opened the front door and half-turned towards her.

  ‘That’s exactly why these things happen,’ he said seriously. ‘We refuse to believe it, all of us. We let it happen.’

  She gawped at him with a look he could not quite summon the energy to decipher. Not until he had thanked her politely for the tea and cakes, and the door was closed carefully and locked behind him, did he understand what her expression disclosed.

  Haldis Grande felt regret. Not for what she had done or not done, for the two years that she had assumed responsibility for Sander for several hours each day. It was the conversation with Henrik Holme that she wished undone, and that made him so furious he broke into a run.

  IV

  It was now Friday 29 July and summer had a foothold on eastern Norway. The hills around Oslo shimmered in the heat. Four days of sunshine after several weeks of grey skies and rain had coloured trees and plants a rich shade of green. Along the road verges the last dandelions of the year burst into bloom, orangey-yellow with the lanky stems of high summer. Many of them had begun to form woolly seedheads. Tiny parachutes followed the gentle breeze blowing from the south, bobbing and dancing up and away. Joachim Boyer, feeling lousy, drove towards Grefsen with his car windows wound down.

  One week had passed.

  For Joachim, it was seven days since Sander died. For the rest of Norway, it was one week since the terrorist had struck. A remarkable week. Even Joachim, who had neither the strength nor the time for anything other than sporadically following the occasional news broadcast, noticed that something was different. A friendliness among people had emerged, an openness between them, in shops, on the streets and in the squares. Strangers said hello to one another, something normally restricted to hill-walkers in this country, and then only once they had put at least ten kilometres between themselves and the city.

  Anja had phoned him on Monday. She had not been in touch since he had dumped her in the spring, but now she wanted him to go with her on the rose procession. As if everything was just like before between them, somehow. She cried on the phone, talking a lot of claptrap about the fragility of life and the importance of cherishing love.

  Joachim had not gone on any rose procession.

  He had not even told her that Sander was dead.

  Joachim Boyer did not know anyone who had been harmed in the government quarter or on Utøya island. All the fuss about ‘OsLove’, and all the signs of solidarity displayed throughout the city since the terrorist attacks, would not last long, in his opinion. The terrorist attacks were too bloody awful, and the monster responsible should be put behind bars for the rest of his life, but Joachim Boyer knew that most things would return to normal as soon as the last victim of the atrocities was laid to rest and the series of memorial ceremonies was finally over and done with. It was typical of Norwegians to gather for peace, freedom, roses and democracy when faced with something like this. When it turned out that the grotesque faggot came from the West End of the city, blond, blue-eyed and inadequate, the effect was so predictable that Joachim almost felt sick when he thought of it. The attack had come from within, and society was completely put out. If it had been a Muslim who had been behind it, as everyone had believed on that first afternoon, no one would have seen so much as a glimpse of a fucking rose. Joachim had grown up in Veitvet in Groruddalen, one of a gang of boys with backgrounds from eight different nations. Mostly he did not give a toss for politics, that was by far the simplest approach, but his boyhood years had taught him that scumbags came in all colours. People you could trust, as well. If anyone had organized a demonstration march against all the racist shit that many of his old pals had been exposed to, he would gladly have turned up. But no thanks. Despite the monster’s ideology giving Hitler a run for his money, from what little Joachim had picked up, there was hardly a voice that dared to take the opportunity to speak out. Like really speak out! Instead they stood there, the Prime Minister and the King and the whole shooting match, intoning about love and openness while people waved roses in the air and shed tears. Even though only a handful of them had ever met any of the people who were really affected. He could not grasp why they were crying. He himself, in so far as he had any viewpoint about the terrorist at all, was pissed off. He thought everyone should be.

  Anja had listened to his tirade, screamed that he was a cynic and slammed down the phone.

  Joachim turned off from Grefsenveien into Glads vei. Two ten-year-old girls were riding on scooters side by side down the middle of the street, preventing him from driving past. They showed no sign of giving way, and he lightly tooted the horn. They did not react immediately, were not even startled, but he
could see they were chatting to each other. They jumped off suddenly, using their right hands to lift their scooters and giving him the finger with their left, as if following some carefully rehearsed ritual. He put his hand on the centre of the steering wheel and responded with a long-drawn-out blast, before accelerating past them. In the rear-view mirror he could see them doubled up with laughter.

  Actually he was not bothered about children.

  They were tiresome. Often cheeky, especially girls. When they were really tiny, two or three years old, they could be sweet in small doses. As the years went by they became mostly obnoxious. Sander had been different. At the beginning, when Joachim had gone home with Jon for the very first time, he had deliberately ingratiated himself with the boy. He wanted to make a good impression on his boss. And it had all started with squash.

  During the lunch-break on one of Joachim’s very first workdays at Mohr & Westberg AS, Jon had asked him if he played. Joachim had lied and said yes. Squash was part of the excesses of the 1990s, to his way of thinking. He himself cycled in summer, went cross-country skiing in winter and lifted weights all year round. Now and again, the old gang from Veitvet got together and played football. Squash was like tennis, Joachim thought, a game for wimps. An older cousin, however, gave him a two-hour crash course before his first game with Jon, and with that they became more or less equally good. They played weekly for a year or so, but by then Joachim had improved so much that it was no longer enjoyable for either of them.

  After only their first workout, three and a half years earlier, Jon had invited him home for a beer. Joachim reacted with a certain amazement, since it would have been more natural to go to a nearby pub. All the same, he accepted and so met Sander for the first time.

  Sander was an oddball.

  Although Jon played squash every week, from a physical point of view he was pretty hopeless. He was tall and gangly, with narrow shoulders and awkward body language. His fitness was OK, but the guy could hardly kick a football or cycle on any surface other than asphalt. Far less do somersaults, something Joachim could do on a flat floor. Sander had gone crazy with delight when he saw that for the first time. On the trampoline, the somersaults were much higher and almost straight. The young lad was big and fairly clumsy, but he never gave up once he had something fixed in his head. At the age of seven he had finally achieved the feat on the trampoline for himself. Not at all straight, and he usually landed on the ground, but all the same. His great glee when succeeding at something had an effect on Joachim. The boy made him feel needed, in a way. He discovered that Sander was patient enough, when he was doing something he enjoyed. Drawing, for example: he could sit for two hours at a stretch, if only he was given paper and felt-tip pens. This ADHD diagnosis that Ellen went on about endlessly might be accurate, but then it was even more difficult to understand why his parents insisted on making the boy do so many boring things. They just made him completely impossible. With Joachim, Sander had learned to swim, dive from the five-metre board at Frogner Baths, cycle down the slalom course at Grefsenkollen in summer and even, into the bargain, how to drive a car. The last of these was neither legal nor a good idea, but they had kept within the confines of a car park in Maridalen. Joachim caught himself smiling at the thought as he drove up to the forecourt in front of the double garage at Ellen and Jon’s house. Sander had looked comical, sitting far forward on the driver’s seat, on a cushion that enabled him, only just, to reach the pedals. His nose barely jutted out above the dashboard when he craned his neck, and he drove happily round and round until they both became dizzy.