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  Ms Håkonsen stares at me for a few seconds. ‘Could you please tell the court what kind of relationship you had with her?’

  Just hearing her name makes my whole body ache. I take a deep breath again. ‘Mari Lindgren was my girlfriend,’ I say, my voice tiny and sad.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘About five months.’

  The courtroom is so silent even the slightest of movements can be heard.

  ‘But she wasn’t your girlfriend on Monday the 17th of October last year, was she?’

  I don’t answer straight away. I just wait a few seconds then shake my head.

  Ms Håkonsen looks at me sternly. ‘For the sake of court proceedings,’ she says, ‘you have to answer the question aloud.’

  ‘Um, no,’ I reply. ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘Why wasn’t she?’ Ms Håkonsen asks. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She … broke up with me.’

  ‘And why did she do that?’ Ms Håkonsen sounds as if she is already getting tired of my answers.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. At the time.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t know on the night of 17th October?’

  I lift my head slightly, searching for Mari’s mother. My eyes lock on hers. She instantly looks away.

  ‘Correct,’ I reply.

  ‘But you know now.’

  ‘I do.’

  Ms Håkonsen looks at me for a few moments.

  ‘I understand why you don’t want to talk about that, but I’m afraid we will have to go into the specifics or your break-up a little bit later. Just so you know.’

  ‘OK,’ I say and cough into my palm.

  ‘Good. When did she break up with you?’

  I can feel the sweat starting to form between my shoulder blades. I hope it won’t show on my face as well.

  ‘A couple of days before…’ I stop for a few beats.

  ‘A couple of days before the 17th of October?’

  I nod, angry at myself for not being calmer and cooler about this. Ms Håkonsen is about to reprimand me again, but I quickly answer:

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. Alright. Let’s talk about the morning after. The morning of October the 18th. Tell us what happened.’

  2

  THEN

  Yngve Mork had never spoken to God. He hadn’t even thought that he could, or should; but the previous night, at a quarter past two, he had sat up in his bed, lifted his gaze towards the ceiling and addressed Him directly for the first time in all his sixty-three years.

  He had asked if she was OK now, if she had found peace. He asked if she was still angry with him and if He might allow him to see her one more time – for real. But his words had been quietly absorbed by the faded yellow plaster of the ceiling. They hadn’t even been spat back at him like a mocking echo.

  Some mornings he woke up with the lingering remnants of a dream in his mind, and with the sudden, panicked thought that she might have come to see him during the night; that she had given him some sign he had missed or already forgotten – a wave or a kiss. He was always hoping that she really was trying to reach out to him, trying to tell him something – trying to say that she had found it in her heart to forgive him.

  Today, though, Yngve’s mobile phone alarm startled him just before seven. It had been yet another one of those almost-sleepless nights. He had turned over again towards the empty side of the bed, only to see that there weren’t any fresh dents in the linen, no marks on the pillow from the pen she had used while trying to solve a newspaper crossword. He had sniffed, searching for a hint of her perfume, the smell that had been beside him for forty-one years; but all he could register was his own odour, a smell that seemed even older and more useless now that he no longer had anyone to share it with.

  All the other women in Åse’s family had grown old. It was the men who found death at an early age – and under the strangest circumstances. A clumsy bicycle accident or a tumble down a ladder when trying to clear leaves from a gutter. A piece of meat that got stuck in a throat during a celebratory dinner. The women could be sick for years, but somehow they seemed to recover.

  So why couldn’t Åse do the same?

  Another question Yngve had asked The Ceiling.

  He got up and went downstairs, and sat at his breakfast table with a buttered slice of bread and a generous helping of Danish liverpaste in front of him. He had coffee and a glass of orange juice as well, but there were no sounds to keep him company other than the ones he made himself: the flipping of a newspaper page, a knife quietly placed on the side of the plate. A quick sniff to get rid of an itch just underneath the tip of his nose. He didn’t want the radio on in case he interrupted her hummings in the bathroom, her steps that might appear in the hallway, the drawers she would open and close whenever she got dressed. Even if she would never do that ever again.

  Yngve’s coffee needed some sugar, so he got up and opened the cupboard above the stove. There he stopped and stared at a yellow box of tea he had bought for her two and a half weeks before she died. It was still wrapped in plastic.

  Could you put the kettle on, please, Yngve?

  Her distant voice made him sob. But before he was sucked into yet another typhoon of grief, the phone rang. He looked at the number and saw that it was being redirected from the 113 service. He would have to take it – he was on call. But first he grabbed the kitchen sink with both hands and steadied himself for a moment. Then he answered, giving his full name and rank.

  At first he didn’t hear anything but breathing. Then came a rush of words. He had to ask the person on the other end to repeat them – twice. ‘He’s dead,’ the voice finally managed to say. ‘He’s just lying there. He’s … there’s blood everywhere.’

  The voice, Yngve now realised, belonged to Tic-Tac, the janitor at Fredheim High School.

  ‘OK,’ Yngve said. ‘Don’t touch anything, just go to the main entrance and stay there. Don’t let anyone in. I’m on my way.’

  Yngve hung up and took a deep breath. Glanced over at the breakfast table. The one plate. The one glass.

  He was on his way, he’d said.

  On his way where?

  That you have to figure out for yourself, Åse had said to him one night when they were talking about the future she would no longer be a part of. But I want you to move on, Yngve. I don’t want you to forget me, but I want you to continue with your life. Can you do that for me?

  He closed the cupboard without looking at the tea bags again and put on his leather uniform coat. He was about to step out into the rain, when she came in through the doorway, almost startling him.

  ‘Oh, hey,’ he muttered. He hadn’t even heard her coming. Even now, when she looked sleepy, her skin pale and dry, he was struck by her incredible beauty. He always was, especially when she had no make-up on. Not a single raindrop seemed to have landed on her completely hairless head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to go; I don’t have time to clear the breakfast table.’

  She said, with her eyes, that it was OK.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, for a lot more than the fact that he had to leave. He looked out of the open door and said: ‘God, it’s really raining.’

  He heard her ask where he was off to, what was going on.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Yngve said. ‘But it doesn’t sound good.’

  Yngve parked as close to the school entrance as possible. Two girls and a boy were standing outside the door as he approached, eager to get in. They stared at him, intrigued.

  The janitor opened the door for him.

  ‘I did as you told me to,’ Tic-Tac said, his voice shaking, a spasm seeming to twist his face. ‘I’ve been standing here the whole time.’

  ‘Can we come in, too?’ one of the girls behind Yngve asked. ’It’s so cold.’

  ‘No,’ he said with a firm voice.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the boy asked. ‘What’
s happened?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ Yngve answered and closed the door. He turned to Tic-Tac. ‘Where is he?’

  Tic-Tac pointed to the stairs. They moved along the hall, their wet shoes making squeaking noises on the floor. ‘I didn’t touch anything,’ Tic-Tac stuttered.

  From halfway along the passage Yngve could see a leg and a shoe. As they approached the stairs, more and more of the body became visible. Thin legs, blue jeans. Dark-red stripes that seemed to form a neat pattern on the young boy’s skinny fingers. There was blood on his coat, too, and on his other hand, arm. On the stairs, the wall.

  Tic-Tac was right, Yngve thought to himself. There really was blood everywhere.

  Fredheim was a small place, but Yngve had seen a lot during his tenure as a police officer here. Body parts in ripped-apart cars, corpses that had been rotting away in the forest throughout the winter. He had seen what people looked like after they’d been hanging by a rope from the ceiling for a couple of weeks, images that sometimes haunted him on nights when sleep was hard to find.

  But this…

  The young boy’s face looked like mince. Skin, blood, muscle. Teeth coloured red.

  ‘It’s Johannes Eklund,’ Tic-Tac said.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Yngve asked without taking his eyes off the kid.

  ‘His coat,’ the janitor said. ‘The logo on his chest.’

  Yngve spotted it now, sewn onto a pocket: an old plane in the middle of a turn, an ‘S’ and a ‘C’ on each wing.

  ‘He was the singer of Sopwith Camel,’ Tic-Tac added. ‘He had a stunning voice. You should have seen him last night. A genuine star.’

  ‘There was a show here yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah. In the auditorium. Opening night of the annual school theatre show.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Between eight and ten, roughly.’

  ‘And you were here? You watched the show?’

  Yngve turned to look at the janitor, who was scratching his left palm.

  ‘I watched a little bit of it, yes.’

  ‘What time did you leave?’

  He seemed to be thinking for a moment. ‘I don’t know, long before the show was over. I knew I had an early start today.’

  ‘So you didn’t lock the doors before you left?’

  Tic-Tac shook his head violently. ‘There was no need. The doors lock automatically at eleven. Everyone should have made their way out by then.’

  ‘Evidently, not everyone did, though.’

  The janitor didn’t reply.

  ‘What happens if someone does stay behind after eleven? Can they still get out?’

  Tic-Tac hesitated for a moment, now scratching his left temple. ‘They can, of course, but it triggers the alarm, and if the alarm goes off, the security company will be here in minutes. We have two surveillance cameras on the outside wall as well, pointing towards the entrance, so it’s easy to find whoever’s responsible. And they get the bill.’

  ’The alarm didn’t go off last night, did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So if people want to avoid triggering the alarm … can they?’

  Again, the janitor appeared to be thinking. ’I guess people will find a way out of here, if they need to. But it’s never really been an issue. People know the rules. Plus, there’s a reminder ten minutes before eleven, a ding-dong sound that’s played for about thirty seconds over the school’s PA system. That always makes people hurry out.’

  Yngve considered this for a moment while turning back to look at Johannes Eklund. Not even the persistent banging on the entrance door could persuade him to wrench his gaze away from what used to be the face of a good-looking young man. Yngve had seen pictures of Johannes in the Fredheim Chronicle.

  ‘Can you see who it is?’ he asked Tic-Tac. He coughed to clear his voice. ‘Let them in if they’re police or from the ambulance service. No one else can enter.’

  Tic-Tac moved quickly, his keys rattling on the chain that hung from his jeans. Yngve took a few more steps towards the staircase, being careful where he placed his feet. He squatted down beside the body and examined it more closely. Now he could clearly see lacerations on the left side of the boy’s forehead. He quickly scanned the stairs and hall for a potential murder weapon. Nothing.

  The sounds of footsteps at the entrance made Yngve stand up. It was his colleagues from Fredheim police station Vibeke Hanstveit and Therese Kyrkjebø. He had called them, on his way to the school. Normally Hanstveit, officially in charge of every investigation they conducted, would stay away from the crime scene, but the second he’d told her that a young boy might have been killed, she’d headed for her car. Kyrkjebø did the same.

  Yngve met them with his arms raised, telling them to brace themselves. Then turned and led them over to the stairs.

  Hanstveit put a hand in front of her mouth. Kyrkjebø made a gasping sound. None of them spoke for a few seconds.

  Finally, Hanstveit cleared her throat and said: ‘Have you called the forensic team yet?’

  ‘No, I was just about to,’ Yngve replied.

  ‘Let me take care of that,’ Hanstveit said. ‘You have other things to tend to right now.’

  Without waiting for his reply Hanstveit pulled her phone from her coat pocket and walked a few steps away. Kyrkjebø edged past Yngve to the foot of the staircase. Drips fell from her clothes onto the floor in front of her, so she moved back slightly. Then she just stood there. And looked. Only her eyelids moved. Her face seemed to lose more colour by the second.

  She swallowed, then swallowed again. ‘He must have been here all night’, she said in a quiet voice. She wiped her wet face. Touched her neck. Then squeezed the tip of her nose between her thumb and index finger.

  Yngve placed a hand on her shoulder. He could feel the muscles tighten under her uniform jacket.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just that…’

  ‘I know,’ Yngve said quietly.

  Kyrkjebø blinked. A tear squeezed its way out. Yngve looked up to the ceiling and sent another thought to God. An angry one.

  ‘Let’s search the rest of the school,’ he said. ‘For all we know the killer could still be here.’

  3

  Yngve asked to borrow Tic-Tac’s keys, then instructed him to go and guard the main entrance door. Once the janitor was in position, Vibeke Hanstveit agreed to stay where she was so she could both monitor the crime scene and keep an eye on potential movements by the door.

  Yngve and Therese then began to search the ground floor, checking every schoolroom, washroom, closet or trash bin. But they didn’t find anyone – or anything that might have been used to kill Johannes Eklund.

  ‘We need to find out when they last cleaned this place,’ Yngve said.

  ‘I’ll get right on it,’ Therese said, her voice still only a whisper.

  Yngve looked at her. Twenty-eight years old, one child at home, another one on the way – although this was hard to tell, except maybe in the slightly more rounded cheeks. He noticed how hard she was trying to steel herself, to think professionally and clearly, something she normally managed easily. Sights this brutal, though, especially with young kids involved, were impossible to prepare for. Pictures in books, however real, never came close to the real thing. Some things you just had to experience the hard way.

  Vibeke Hanstveit was still on the phone when Yngve and Therese got back to the staircase. Just as they arrived, a tall, grey, bearded man emerged from the staffroom at the other end of the hallway. Yngve recognised him immediately. It was the school’s principal, Tor-Olav Brakstad.

  ‘How the hell did he get in?’ Therese asked.

  Yngve started to walk towards the principal, raising a hand in the air to get him to stop.

  ‘There’s been a crime here,’ Yngve said to him. ’We have to shut down the whole school.’

  ‘What?’ Brakstad asked. He had a bewildered look on his face. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t go into any detai
ls just yet,’ Yngve replied. ‘We only got here a few minutes ago. How did you get in?’

  ‘The janitor’s door,’ Brakstad explained and nodded in its direction. ‘On the other side of the school.’

  ‘The janitor has his own entrance?’ Yngve couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

  ‘It’s right next to his parking space,’ Brakstad said. ‘For me it’s a short cut. But what…?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you have to leave. No one but police or medical examiners can be here right now.’

  ‘But…’

  Brakstad tried to look past Yngve. The police officer made himself as big as he could in order to block the view. ‘Have you seen or heard anyone else in the building – since you arrived, I mean?’

  Brakstad shook his head. ‘But…’ he started.

  ‘You can’t be here now,’ Yngve said firmly while glancing out of the windows. More pupils had arrived, and it was impossible for them all to fit under the canopy over the entrance. So they just stood there in the rain, alarms and questions written all over their faces.

  ‘Can I get my coat first?’ Brakstad asked. ‘It’s freezing out there.’

  Yngve looked at the clouds of steam pouring from the students’ mouths, then instantly evaporating. ‘Be quick about it,’ he said.

  Brakstad hurried away and returned a minute later. Again he tried to see what was going on at the end of the staircase, but Yngve put a hand on his shoulder and led him towards the exit. Tic-Tac opened the door. The noise from the thunderous rain made Yngve raise his voice: ‘I’ll find you later.’

  Brakstad turned and shot him another quizzical look. ‘I’m going to need help,’ Yngve continued. ‘With information, first and foremost. We just have to get a grip on the situation first.’

  He then turned to the students: ‘Go home, please. There won’t be any school today.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ one of the boys nearest the entrance asked.

  ‘Please, just go home,’ Yngve pleaded. ‘You’re making it harder for us to do our job.’

  But neither the boy nor any of the other children made any attempt to leave. Instead they began to throw questions at both Yngve and the principal.