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⸙⸙⸙

‘Thorkild,’ Ulf says, abruptly, decisively, as I’m about to hang up. ‘There’s someone who wants to talk to you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Someone you know. From before.’

He hesitates, as if he still hasn’t quite made up his mind whether this is something he really ought to tell me before the support team in its entirety has had a chance to analyse the matter.

‘Who?’

‘Frei’s uncle,’ Ulf finally says before adding, ‘and his ex-wife, Anniken Moritzen.’

‘Arne Villmyr?’ I feel the anxiety come creeping back. All at once my mouth is dry as dust and the sunlight slanting round the blanket stretched over the window is hurting my eyes. ‘Why?’

‘It’s not to do with Frei,’ Ulf answers in a strained voice, as if still not entirely sure about what he’s doing. ‘Arne and his ex-wife, they have a son—’

‘Arne’s gay,’ I break in. I’m not keen on the direction this conversation is taking, and at the same time I feel a mounting disquiet inside me and yearn to just hang up and shut it all out.

‘All the same,’ Ulf says calmly, giving me no excuse to disconnect, ‘he has an ex-wife and a son—’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’ I squeeze my eyelids shut and twist my face away from the piercing light.

‘If you’d just let me finish,’ Ulf continues, before exhaling loudly. ‘You see, Anniken Moritzen is one of my patients. She needs …’ Again he hesitates, taking a deep breath before he continues: ‘They need help. Their son has disappeared.’

‘I’m not a private investigator.’

‘No, God forbid,’ Ulf wheezes. ‘But Anniken is a friend and I don’t know how much I can do for her in this situation. Besides, you and Arne have this shared past, one that you can’t escape, no matter what, and now he’s asked to be allowed to speak to you. I think you owe him that much?’

The pain is pressing against the skin on my face, my eyes and the outer layer of my brain. ‘Please,’ I groan through gritted teeth. ‘Not today, not now.’

‘Talk to them. Hear what they have to say.’

‘I don’t want to.’

Ulf sighs again. ‘You’ve drawn your lot, Thorkild, gone down into the cellar and come back up again. A changed man.’ He gasps for breath as he stubs out his cigarette. Half-smoked, spoiled. ‘Don’t let that bedsit become your new prison cell. You need to get out, talk to people and find out who you want to be in this new life of yours, beyond the prison walls.’

‘I know,’ I whisper, sinking into the sofa again. I open my eyes, force my gaze to confront the glowing light that fills the room, and hold it there until my eyes are brimming.

‘What did you say?’

‘That I know.’

‘Sure?’ Ulf Solstad drops his voice to a more therapeutic level. ‘OK,’ he says when I don’t respond. His breathing is quieter now. ‘Then you can pop in afterwards, and we can take a look at those medicines of yours at the same time. Will you do that? Will you?’

Ulf Solstad’s third attempt to smoke the perfect cigarette would have to be made in splendid isolation.

⸙⸙⸙

Arne Villmyr stands beside Anniken Moritzen, who is seated in an office chair with her hands folded on the desk in front of her. Behind them, three floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Forus landscape with its roaring motorways and industrial buildings. Arne is dressed with the same good taste as the first time I met him almost four years ago in his villa at Storhaug Vest, but his hair has grown thinner and his face paler.

‘Thorkild Aske?’ Anniken Moritzen enquires, without rising from her chair.

‘Yes,’ I reply, and take a reluctant step closer.

‘Nice to meet you,’ she answers, joylessly. I detect apathetic contempt as she finally offers me her hand to shake: I observe that the right-hand corner of her mouth refuses to respond to the smile impulse and remains paralysed. The outcome looks more like a sneer than anything else.

Arne Villmyr makes no move to return the gesture when I stretch out my hand to shake his.

‘I have a picture of him.’ Anniken Moritzen produces a photograph from one of the desk drawers.

‘That’s nice,’ I venture, leaning towards her and using both hands to pick up the photograph so that it doesn’t slip between my fingers and fall to the floor.

‘It was taken five months ago when we visited my parents in Jutland.’ Anniken speaks in a sort of upper-class accent, making no secret of her Danish origins. She’s in her mid-fifties, I’d guess, dressed in a dark blue jacket and matching skirt, with a white blouse, its two top buttons left open. It strikes me that she must be a whole head taller than her ex-husband.

‘It looks like a great place for a child to grow up.’

She looks at me as if about to say that she knows what I’m getting at, but lets it pass. ‘It’s the last picture I have of him.’ She lingers over the image, which shows her in her parents’ garden, barbecuing food and drinking lemonade. Her son Rasmus is tending the barbecue, dressed in a pair of red Liverpool football shorts, flip-flops and a white chef’s hat. He is tanned and has an athletic build. His grandfather is toasting the unseen photographer with a dram while Anniken Moritzen sits smiling in a chair.

‘Rasmus and some of his school friends spent the past year travelling round the world in a yacht.’ Anniken looks dreamily at the back of the photo as she talks, as if to soak the last dregs of energy out of the memory it prompts. ‘But after a trip to northern Norway, he hit upon the idea of turning a former conference centre in a lighthouse there into an outdoor activity hotel.’

‘Activity hotel?’

‘Wreck diving, harpoon fishing and so on. Rasmus says it’s very popular overseas.’

‘How old is he?’ I ask, even though I already know. On the bus to Forus, I found a report in an online Tromsø newspaper about a missing 27-year-old man, assumed to have perished in a diving accident not far from the village of Skjellvik in Blekøyvær district.

‘Our Rasmus is twenty-seven.’

‘And when did he go there?’

‘Anniken bought the place for him to use last summer,’ Arne says. Behind him, the sea breeze has begun to tug at the rain clouds. Silvery shades of grey scud in a south-westerly direction.

Anniken nods without looking at either of us. ‘The entire little island and its lighthouse have been left abandoned since the former conference centre went bust back in the eighties. Rasmus went up immediately afterwards with a few of his friends to help him with the renovations until the holidays were over.’

‘When did he go missing?’

‘The last time I spoke to him was on Friday, five days ago. The police found his boat yesterday morning, so they believe he went out diving on either Saturday or Sunday.’

‘And you?’ I glance up at Arne Villmyr, who is staring vacantly ahead, like a soldier at attention, while the rain has begun to tap against the windows at his back.

Arne shakes his head gently just as the heavens open above us with a resounding crash and sheets of water start to pour down the glass.

‘They don’t have much contact,’ Anniken answers, pressing her arms to her sides, as if finding herself suddenly out there in the downpour.

‘Was he alone when he disappeared?’ I ask, my gaze shifting to the grey tones beyond the windowpane.

‘Yes, for the past month he’s been there on his own.’

‘Why do the police believe he drowned?’ A bit more, Thorkild, I intone to myself, deep down. Just a few more questions, and then you can go home.

‘When they found the boat, the diving gear was gone. Rasmus was in the habit of going out to the skerries beyond the lighthouse to dive when he had spare time. On Friday he said he wanted to go out diving that weekend if the weather was good enough.’

‘Have you any reason to think anything else might have happened to him, or that this isn’t a diving accident?’

‘No.’ Irritation is etched on her face. Probably I’m interrupting her at the same point as everyone else she has spoken to since her son disappeared.

I feel an impulse to go over and give her a shake, tell her she has to wake up, stop dreaming. It’s leading her nowhere. These dreams we dream with our eyes wide open.

‘I went up there as soon as I got no answer. I felt something was wrong.’ Anniken Moritzen turns to face her ex-husband. ‘I told you that, didn’t I? He would have returned my call. He always phones back.’

Arne puts his hand carefully on her shoulder and gives a silent nod.

‘But the weather was stormy up there,’ she continues.

‘The local police chief and his assistant refused to take me out to the lighthouse and treated me like a hysterical nuisance they could just show to a hotel room in Tromsø, a hundred kilometres away, while they went on sitting there in their offices without lifting a finger. No one would help me, no one would do anything. They’re just sitting there, do you understand? They’re just sitting there doing nothing while my boy is somewhere out on the sea, needing help!’ She sobs bitterly. ‘That’s why I came home again, Arne,’ she whispers, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘Because you said you’d find someone who could help us. Someone who would listen. Do you remember that? You promised to find somebody who could help us.’

Arne closes his eyes and keeps them like that as he nods, over and over again. Anniken Moritzen turns to me once more. ‘You, Aske.’ She takes a deep breath and wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘They’ll talk to you. I know that. You’ll be able to find him,’ she says, smiling warmly at what this fantasy conjures up inside her mind. Hugs to herself the illusion that there is still time. ‘Yes, you’ll be able to find Rasmus for me.’

Once again I lower my gaze to the man in the photograph. When I was the same age as Rasmus, I was a chief inspector of police in Finnmark and spent my time dissuading drunken snow-scooter drivers from shooting road signs in the area to smithereens. ‘I’m not a detective,’ I begin to say, putting the photograph down on the desk in front of me.

‘We’ll pay you,’ Arne Villmyr interjects. ‘If you’re worried about the money side of things.’

‘It’s not that—’ I’m going to say that it’s too late. That no one can disappear at sea under such circumstances and then return again almost a week later. But Arne Villmyr has already let go of the chair’s back and is on his way around the desk.

‘Come on,’ he says, grabbing my upper arm. He points brusquely at the door. ‘Let’s take this conversation outside.’

We leave Anniken Moritzen and step out into the corridor, all the way along to the lift.

‘So,’ he says, releasing my arm when we get there. He presses the lift button and turns to face me. ‘Now it’s just the two of us again.’

‘Listen—’

‘My son is dead,’ Arne Villmyr says calmly as he adjusts his tie. ‘There’s nothing to investigate,’ he continues, when he’s finished fiddling. He looks at me. ‘What you have to do is go up there, find his dead body and bring it home.’

‘My God,’ I exclaim, spreading my arms in dismay. ‘How am I supposed to do that?’

‘Swim, dive, jump through red-hot rings of fire, I don’t give a shit how you do it. I lost Rasmus when I left my family years ago. But he can’t just vanish as if he has never existed. We need a grave to visit.’ Arne’s jaw muscles tense and his eyes harden. ‘And I’ve convinced myself you’re the person who can give us that. Call it payback for an old debt, call it whatever the fuck you like, just find him.’

‘Arne,’ I venture. ‘Please. What happened with Frei, you can’t use that, now. Not in this way—’

‘That’s enough, Thorkild,’ he says, just as unruffled and steady as before, although the tightness in his jawline is still there. ‘You’re not to speak about her,’ he goes on. ‘Not yet. Not until you’ve found Rasmus and brought him home again. Afterwards, you can crawl back down into the hole you came from and do whatever you like with the rest of your life. But until then: you search and I pay. Got that?’

The lift has already come up and disappeared down again when Arne turns to stalk back to Anniken Moritzen’s office. He stops in front of the door with his back to me. ‘Give us a grave, Aske,’ he says as he puts his hand on the door handle. ‘Yet another grave. Is that so damned much to ask?’

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7 January 2020

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