Burned, by Thomas Enger
Read an extended extract from Thomas Enger’s debut Norwegian crime novel, a thriller that has steadily built a strong reputation via word of mouth, resulting in UK publication by Faber this month.
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A BRUTALISED VICTIM IN THE WILDS
A solitary tent is found to contain the body of a half-buried woman. She’s been stoned to death. There are lash marks across her back. One of her hands has been cut off.
A LONE VOICE
Two years earlier internet reporter Henning Juul lost his son, Jonas, in a domestic fire. As he returns to work, physically and emotionally scarred, Henning struggles to escape this past and to be taken seriously again as a reporter – by his colleagues, his ex-wife and the police.
A MYSTERY IGNITED
Told to cover the story of the woman in the tent, he finds an increasingly dangerous trail and, despite an early arrest, he is convinced that the story is more complex than the police think…
++++
Prologue
September 2007
He thinks it’s dark all around him, but he can’t be sure. He can’t seem to open his eyes. Is the ground cold? Or wet?
He thinks it might be raining. Something touches his face. Early snow? The first snow?
Jonas loves the snow.
Jonas.
Shrivelled carrots in snowmen’s faces, clumps of grass and earth. No, not now. Frosty the Snowman, it can’t be you. Can it?
He tries to lift his right arm, but it won’t move. Hands. Does he still have them? His thumb twitches.
Or, at least, he thinks it does.
His skin is crisp and delicate like snowflakes. Flames everywhere. So hot. His face slides down like batter on a sizzling frying pan.
Jonas loves pancakes.
Jonas.
The ground is shaking. Voices. Silence. Wonderful silence. Protect me, please. You, who are watching me.
It’ll be all right. Don’t be scared. I’ll take care of you.
The laughter fades. He is out of breath. Hold my hand, hold it tight.
But where are you?
There. There you are. We were here. You and I.
Jonas loves that there is a ‘you and I’.
Jonas.
Horizons. Blizzard rain on an infinite blue surface. A plop breaks the surface, line and bait sink.
Cold wood beneath his feet. His eyes are still stuck together.
It’ll be all right. Don’t be scared. I’ll take care of you.
He feels the balcony under his feet. He has a firm foothold.
Or so he thinks.
Empty hands. Where are you? Rewind, please – please rewind.
A wall of darkness. Everything is reduced to darkness. Siren sounds approach.
He manages to open one eye. It’s not snow. It’s not rain. There is only darkness.
He has never seen darkness before. Never really seen it, never seen what the darkness can conceal.
But he sees it now.
Jonas was scared of the dark.
He loves Jonas.
Jonas.
——————————————————-
Chapter 1
June 2009
Her blonde curls are soaked in blood.
The ground has opened up and tried to swallow her. Only her head and torso are visible. Her rigid body is propped up by the damp earth; she looks like a single, long-stemmed red rose. Blood has trickled down her back in thin, elongated lines, like tears on a melancholic cheek. Her naked back resembles an abstract painting.
He takes hesitant steps inside the tent, glancing from side to side. Turn around, he tells himself. This has nothing to do with you. Just turn around, go back outside, go home, and forget what you’ve seen. But he can’t. How can he?
‘H-hallo?’
Only the swishing branches of the trees reply. He takes a few more steps. The air is suffocating and clammy. The smell reminds him of something. But what?
The tent wasn’t there yesterday. To someone like him, who walks his dog every day on Ekeberg Common, the sight of the large white tent was irresistible. The strange location. He just had to look inside.
If only he could have stopped himself.
Her hand isn’t attached. It’s lying, severed, next to her arm as though it has come undone at her wrist. Her head slumps towards one shoulder. He looks at them again, the blonde curls. Random patches of matted red hair make it look like a wig.
He edges up to the young woman, but stops abruptly, hyperventilating to the point where his breathing stops. His stomach muscles knot and prepare to expel the coffee and banana he had for breakfast, but he suppresses the reflex. He backs away, carefully, blinking, before he takes another look at her.
One eye is dangling from its socket. Her nose is squashed flat and seems to have disappeared into her skull. Her jaw is dented and covered with purple bruises and cuts. Thick black blood has gushed from a hole in her forehead, down into her eyes and across the bridge of what remains of her nose. One tooth hangs from a thread of coagulated blood inside her lower lip. Several teeth are scattered in the grass in front of the woman who once had a face.
Not any more.
The last thing Thorbjørn Skagestad remembers, before staggering out of the tent, is the nail varnish on her fingers. Blood red.
Just like the heavy stones lying around her.
——-
Henning Juul doesn’t know why he sits here. In this particular spot. The crude seating, let into the hillside, is hard. Rough and raw. Painful. And yet he always sits here. In the exact same spot. Deadly nightshade grows between the seating which slopes up towards Dælenenga Club House. Bumblebees buzz eagerly around the poisonous berries. The planks are damp. He can feel it in his backside. He should probably change his trousers when he gets home, but he knows he won’t bother.
Henning used to come here to smoke. He no longer smokes. Nothing to do with good health or common sense. His mother has smoker’s lung, but that’s not what stops him. He wishes desperately he could smoke. Slim white friends, always happy to see you, though they never stay for long, sadly. But he can’t, he just can’t.
There are people around, but nobody sits next to him. A soccer mum down by the artificial turf looks up at him. She quickly averts her eyes. He is used to people looking at him while pretending they aren’t. He knows they wonder who he is, what has happened to him and why he sits there. But no one ever asks. No one dares.
He doesn’t blame them.
——-
He gets up to leave when the sun starts to go down. He is dragging one leg. The doctors have told him he should try to walk as naturally as possible, but he can’t manage it. It hurts too much. Or perhaps it doesn’t hurt enough.
He knows what pain is.
He shuffles to Birkelunden Park, past the recently restored pavilion with its new roof. A gull cries out. There are plenty of gulls in Birkelunden Park. He hates gulls. But he likes the park.
Still limping, he passes horizontal lovers, naked midriffs, foaming cans of beer and wafts of smoke from disposable barbecues burning themselves out. An old man frowns in concentration before throwing a metal ball towards a cluster of other metal balls on the gravel where, for once, children have left the bronze statue of a horse alone. The man misses. He only ever misses.
You and I, Henning thinks, we’ve a lot in common.
The first drop of rain falls as he turns into Seilduksgate. A few steps later, he leaves behind the bustle of Grünerløkka. He doesn’t like noise. He doesn’t like Chelsea Football Club or traffic wardens either, but there is not a lot he can do about it. There are plenty of traffic wardens in Seilduksgate. He doesn’t know if any of them supports Chelsea. But Seilduksgate is his street.
He likes Seilduksgate.
With the rain spitting on his head, he walks west towards the setting sun above the Old Sail Loft, from which the street takes its name. He lets the drops fall on him and squints to make out the contours of an object in front. A gigantic yellow crane soars towards the sky. It has been there forever. The clouds behind him are still grey.
Henning approaches the junction where Markvei has priority from the right, and he thinks that everything might be different tomorrow. He doesn’t know if it’s an original thought or whether someone has planted it inside his head. Possibly nothing will change. Perhaps only voices and sounds will be different. Someone might shout. Someone might whisper.
Perhaps everything will be different. Or nothing. And within that tension is a world turned upside down. Do I still belong in it, he wonders? Is there room for me? Am I strong enough to unlock the words, the memories and the thoughts which I know are buried deep inside me?
He doesn’t know.
There is a lot he doesn’t know.
——-
He lets himself into the flat after climbing three long flights of stairs where the dust floats above the ingrained dirt in the woodwork. An appropriate transition to his home. He lives in a dump. He prefers it that way. He doesn’t think he deserves a large hallway, closets the size of shopping centres, a kitchen whose cupboards and drawers look like a freshly watered ice rink, self-cleaning white goods, delicate floors inviting you to slow dance, walls covered with classics and reference books, nor does he deserve a designer clock, a Lilia block candleholder from Georg Jensen or a bedspread made from the foreskin of humming birds. All he needs is a single mattress, a fridge and somewhere to sit down when the darkness creeps in. Because it inevitably does.
Every time he closes the front door behind him, he gets the feeling that something is amiss. His breathing quickens, he feels hot all over, his palms grow sweaty. There is a stepladder to the right, just inside the hall. He takes the stepladder, climbs it and locates the Clas Ohlson bag on the old green hat rack. He takes out a box of batteries, reaches for the smoke alarm, eases out the battery and replaces it with a fresh one.
He tests it to make sure it works.
When his breathing has returned to normal, he climbs down. He has learned to like smoke alarms. He likes them so much that he has eight.
——————————————————–
Chapter 2
He turns over with a disappointed grunt, when his alarm clock goes off. He was halfway through a dream which evaporates as his eyes glide open and the dawn seeps in. There was a woman in the dream. He doesn’t remember what she looked like, but he knows she was the Woman of his Dreams.
Henning swears, then he sits up and looks around. His eyes stop at the pill jars and the matchbox which greet him every morning. He sighs, swings his legs out of bed and thinks that today, today is the day he’ll do it.
He exhales, rubs his face and starts with the simplest task. The pills are chalky and fiendish. As usual, he swallows them dry because it’s harder that way. He forces them down his throat, gulps, and waits for them to disappear down his digestive tract and do the job which Dr Helge enthusiastically claims is for Henning’s own good.
He slams the jar unnecessarily hard against the bedside table, as if to wake himself up. He snatches the matchbox. Slowly, he slides it open and looks at its contents. Twenty wooden soldiers from hell. He takes out one, studies the sulphur, a red cap of concentrated evil. Safety Matches it says on the front.
A contradiction in terms.
He presses the thin matchstick against the side of the box and is about to strike it when his hands seize up. He concentrates, mobilising all his strength in his hands, in his fingers, but the aggravating splinter of wood simply refuses to shift, it fails to obey and remains unimpressed. He starts to sweat, his chest tightens, he tries to breathe, but it’s no good. He makes a second attempt, takes out another tiny sword of evil and attacks the matchbox with it, but soon realises that he doesn’t have the same fighting spirit this time, nowhere near the same willpower now, and he gives up trying to turn thought into action. He remembers that he needs to breathe and suppresses the urge to scream.
It’s very early in the morning. That explains it. Arne, who lives upstairs, might still be asleep despite his habit of reciting Halldis Moren Vesaas’s poetry day and night.
Henning sighs and carefully returns the matchbox to the exact same spot on the bedside table. Gently, he runs his hands over his face. He touches the patches where the skin is different, softer, but not as smooth. The scars on the outside are nothing compared to the ones on the inside, he thinks, and then he gets up.
——-
The sleeping city. That’s where he wants to be. And he is here now. In the Grünerløkka district of Oslo, early in the morning, before the city explodes into action, before the pavement cafés fill up, before mum and dad have to go to work, the children are off to nursery, and cyclists run as many red lights as they can as they hurtle down Toftesgate. Only a few people are up and about, as are the ever-scavenging pigeons.
He passes the fountain on Olaf Ryes Square and listens to the sound of the water. He is good at listening. And he is good at identifying sounds. He imagines there is no sound but the trickling water and pretends it’s the day the world ends. If he concentrates, he can hear cautious strings, then a dark cello slowly intermingling before fading away and gradually giving way to kettledrums warning of the misery that is to come.
Today, however, he doesn’t have time to let the music of the morning overwhelm him. He is on his way to work. The very thought turns his legs to jelly. He doesn’t know if Henning Juul still exists, the Juul who used to get four job offers a year, who made the mute sing, who made the days start earlier – just for him – because he was stalking his prey and needed the light.
He knows who he was.
Does Halldis have a poem for someone like me, he wonders? Probably.
Halldis has a poem for everyone.
——-
He stops when he sees the yellow brick colossus at the top of Urtegata. People think the huge Securitas logo on the wall means the security firm occupies the entire office block, but several private businesses and public bodies are located here. As is www.123nyheter.no where Henning works, an Internet-only newspaper which advertises itself with the slogan ‘1-2-3 News – as easy as 1-2-3!’
He doesn’t think it’s a particularly good slogan – not that he cares. They have been good to him, given him time to recover, time to get his head straight.
A three-metre-tall fence with black metal spears surrounds the building. The gate is an integral part of the fence and slowly slides open to let out a Loomis van. He passes a small, deserted guard booth and tries to open the entrance door. It refuses. He peers through the glass door. No one around. He presses a brushed steel button with a plate saying reception above it. A brusque female voice calls out ‘yes’.
‘Hello,’ he says, clearing his throat. ‘Would you let me in, please?’
‘Who are you meeting?’
‘I work here.’
A period of silence follows.
‘Did you forget your swipecard?’
He frowns. What swipecard?
‘No, I haven’t got one.’
‘Everyone has a swipecard.’
‘Not me.’
Another silence. He waits for a continuation which never comes.
‘Would you let me in, please?’
A shrill buzzing sound makes him jump. The door whirrs. Clumsily, he pulls it open, enters and checks the ceiling. His eyes quickly identify a smoke alarm. He waits until it flashes green.
The grey slate floor is new. Looking around, he realises that many things have changed. There are big plants in even bigger pots on the floor, the walls have been painted white and decorated with artwork he doesn’t understand. They have a canteen now, he sees, to the left behind a glass door. The reception is opposite it, also behind a glass door. He opens it and enters. There is a smoke alarm in the ceiling. Good.
Behind the counter, the woman with red hair in a ponytail looks fraught. She is frantically hammering away at the keyboard. The light from the monitor reflects in her grumpy face. Behind her are pigeonholes overflowing with papers, leaflets, parcels and packages. A TV screen, hooked up to a PC, is mounted on the wall. The newspaper’s front page clamours for his attention and he reads the headline:
WOMAN FOUND DEAD
Then he reads the strap-line:
Woman found dead in tent on Ekeberg Common. Police suspect murder.
He knows the news desk has yet to cover the story, because the title and the strap-line contain the same information. No reporters have been at the scene, either. The story is accompanied by an archive photo of police tape cordoning off a totally different location.
Neat.
Henning waits for the receptionist to notice him. She doesn’t. He moves closer and says hello. At last, she looks up. First, she stares at him as if he had struck her. Then the inevitable reaction. Her jaw drops, her eyes takes it in, his face, the burns, the scars. They aren’t large, not embarrassingly large, but large enough for people to stare just that little bit too long.
‘It looks like I need a swipecard,’ he says with as much politeness as he can muster. She is still staring at him, but forces herself to snap out of the bubble she has sought refuge inside. She starts rummaging through some papers.
‘Eh, yes. Eh – what’s your name?’
‘Henning Juul.’
She freezes and then she looks up again, slowly this time.
An eternity passes before she says:
‘Oh, that’s you.’
He nods, embarrassed. She opens a drawer, riffles though more papers until she finds a plastic cover and a swipecard.
‘You’ll have to have a temporary pass. It takes time to make a new one and it needs to be registered with the booth outside before you can open the gate yourself, and, well, you know. The code is 1221. Should be easy to remember.’
She hands him the swipecard.
‘And I’ll need to take your picture.’
He looks at her.
‘My picture?’
‘Yes. For the swipecard. And for your by-line in the paper. Let’s kill two birds with one stone, right? Ha-ha.’
She attempts a smile, but her lips tremble slightly.
‘I’ve done a photography course,’ she says as if to pre-empt any protest. ‘You just stand there and I’ll do the rest.’
A camera appears from behind the counter. It is mounted on a tripod. She cranks it up. Henning doesn’t know where to look, so he gazes into the distance.
‘That’s good. Try to smile.’
Smile. He can’t remember the last time he did that. She clicks three times in quick succession.
‘Great. I’m Sølvi,’ she says and offers him her hand over the counter. He takes it. Soft, lovely skin. He can’t remember the last time he felt soft, lovely skin against his. She squeezes his hand, exerting just the right amount of pressure. He looks at her and lets go.
As he turns to leave, he wonders if she noticed the smile which almost formed on his lips.
————————————————–
Chapter 3
Henning has to swipe his shiny new card no less than three times, going from the reception area to the second floor. Though the office is where it always was, there is nothing to remind him of the place he had almost settled into, nearly two years ago. Everything is new, even the carpet. There are grey and white surfaces, a kitchenette, and he would bet good money that there are clean glasses and mugs in the cupboards. There are flat screens everywhere, on the desks and on the walls.
He checks out the room. Four smoke alarms. Two foam extinguishers, possibly more. Good. Or good enough.
It is a large, L-shaped room. Work stations by the windows, tables and chairs behind coloured glass partitions. There are tiny individual cubicles for when you want to conduct an interview without an audience or any background noise. There are lavatories, disabled ones as well, even though he can’t actually see anyone even mildly infirm. He imagines there are rules about such things. They have always had a coffee maker, but now they have the state-of-the-art version, which takes twenty-nine seconds to make a fancy cup of black coffee. Not four, like the old one.
Henning loves coffee. You’re not a proper reporter unless you love coffee.
He recognises the buzz immediately. Foreign TV stations, all reporting the same news over and over. Everything is breaking news. Stock exchange figures scroll along the bottom of the screen. A collage of TV screens show what NRK and TV2 are reporting on their strangely antiquated, but still viable text TV pages. The news channel runs its features on a loop. It, too, has a ticker which condenses a story into one sentence. He hears the familiar crackle of a police radio, as if R2D2 from the Star Wars movies intermittently makes contact from a galaxy far, far away. NRK News 24 can just about be heard from a radio somewhere.
Bleary-eyed reporters tap on keyboards, telephones ring, stories are debated, angles suggested. In a corner by the news desk, where every story is weighed, measured, rejected, applauded, polished or heavily edited, lies a mountain of newspapers – new and old – which the newly arrived reporters seize upon while they sip their first coffee of the day.
It is the usual controlled chaos. And yet, everything seems alien. The ease he felt after years of working in the streets, of being in the field, of showing up at a crime scene, knowing he was in his element, has completely disappeared. It all belongs to another lifetime, another era.
He feels like a cub reporter again. Or as if he is taking part in a play where he has been cast as The Victim, the poor soul everyone has to take care of, help back on his feet. And even though he hasn’t spoken a single word to anyone, except Sølvi, his intuition tells him no one thinks it’s going to work. Henning Juul will never be the same again.
He takes a few, hesitant steps and looks around to see if he recognises anyone. It’s all faces and fragments from a distant past, like an episode of This Is Your Life. Then he spots Kåre.
Kåre Hjeltland is looking over the shoulder of a reporter at the news desk. Kåre is the news editor at 123news. He is a short, skinny man with messy hair and a passion which exceeds anything Henning has ever known. Kåre is the Duracell bunny on speed with a hundred stories in his head at any given time and an arsenal of possible angles for practically anything.
That’s why he is the news editor. If it had been up to Kåre, he would have been in charge of every department and worked as the night duty editor as well. He has Tourette’s Syndrome, not the easiest condition to manage when you’re trying to run a news desk and have a social life.
However, despite his tics and various other symptoms, Kåre pulls it off. Henning doesn’t know how, but Kåre pulls it off.
Kåre has noticed him, too. He waves and holds up one finger. Henning nods and waits patiently, while Kåre issues instructions to the reporter.
‘And stress that in the introduction. That’s the hook, no one cares that the tent was white or bought from Maxbo last March. Get it?’
‘Maxbo doesn’t sell tents.’
‘Whatever. You know what I mean. And mention that she was found naked as soon as possible. It’s important. It plants a sexy image in people’s minds. Gives them something to get off on.’
The reporter nods. Kåre slaps him on the shoulder and bounces towards Henning. He nearly trips over a cable running across the floor, but carries on regardless. Even though he is only a few metres away now, he shouts.
‘Henning, good to see you again. Welcome back.’
Kåre extends a hand, but doesn’t wait for Henning to offer him his. He simply grabs Henning’s hand and shakes it. Henning’s forehead feels hot.
‘So – how are things? You ready to chase web hits again?’
Henning thinks earmuffs might be a good investment.
‘Well, I’m here, that’s a start.’
‘Super. Fantastic. We need people like you, people who know how to give the public what they want. Great. Sex sells, coffers swell! Tits and ass bring in the cash!’
Kåre laughs out loud. His face starts to twitch, but he carries on all the same. Kåre has coined a lot of rhyming slogans in his time. Kåre loves rhymes.
‘Ahem, I thought you could sit over there with the rest of the team.’
Kåre takes Henning by the arm and leads him past a red glass partition. Six computers, three on opposite sides of a square table, are backed up against each other. A mountain of newspapers lies on a round table behind it.
‘You may have noticed that things have changed, but I haven’t touched your work station. It’s exactly the same. After what happened, I thought that you – eh – would want to decide for yourself if there was anything you wanted to throw out.’
‘Throw out?’
‘Yes. Or reorganise. Or – you know.’
Henning looks around.
‘Where are the others?’
‘Who?’
‘The rest of the team?’
‘Buggered if I know, lazy sods. Oh yes, Heidi is here. Heidi Kjus. She’s around somewhere. In charge of national news now, she is.’
Henning feels his chest tighten. Heidi Kjus.
Heidi was one of the first temps from the Oslo School of Journalism he hired a million years ago. Newly qualified journalists are usually so bursting with theory that they have forgotten what really makes a good reporter: charming manners and common sense. If you’re curious by nature and don’t allow yourself to be fobbed off with the first thing people tell you, you’ll go far. But if you want to be a star reporter, you also need to be a bit of a bastard, throw caution to the wind and have enough fire in your belly to go the distance, accept adversity, and never give up if you smell a good story.
Heidi Kjus had all of the above. From day one. On top of that, she had a hunger Henning had never seen before. Right from the start, no story was too small or too big, and it wasn’t long before she had acquired sources and contacts as well as experience. As she began to realise just how good she was, she added a generous helping of arrogance to the heavy make-up, she plastered on every morning.
Some reporters have an aura about them, an attitude which screams: ‘My job is the most important in the whole world and I’m better than the lot of you.’ Heidi admired people with sharp elbows and soon developed her own. She took up space, even when she was working as a temp. She made demands.
Henning was working for Nettavisen at the time Heidi graduated. He was their crime reporter, but it was also his job to train new reporters and temps, show them the ropes, put them straight and nudge them in the direction of the overall aim: turning them into workhorses who wouldn’t need micromanaging in order to deliver top stories that attract web hits 24/7.
He enjoyed this aspect of his job. And Nettavisen was a great first job for young journalists, even though most of them had no idea they were driving a Formula 1 car around increasingly congested streets in a media circus that grew bigger every day. Many were unsuited for this life, this way of thinking and working. And the problem was that as soon as he saw the beginnings of a good on-line reporter, they would leave. They would get offers of new jobs, better jobs or full-time employment contracts elsewhere.
Heidi left after only four months. She got an offer from Dagbladet she couldn’t refuse. He didn’t blame her. It was Dagbladet, after all. More status. More money. Heidi wanted it all and she wanted it now. And she got it.
And she’s my new boss, he thinks. Bloody hell. This is bound to end in tears.
‘It’ll be good to have you back in the saddle, Henning,’ Kåre enthuses.
Henning says ‘mm’.
‘Morning meeting in ten minutes. You’ll be there, won’t you?’
Henning says ‘mm’ again.
‘Lovely. Lovely. Got to dash. I’ve another meeting.’
Kåre smiles, gives him a thumbs-up, and leaves. In passing, he slaps someone on the shoulder, before he disappears around the corner. Henning shakes his head. Then he sits down on a chair that squeaks and rocks like a boat. A new red notebook, still in its wrapper, lies next to the keyboard. Four pens. He guesses that none of them works. A pile of old print-outs. He recognises them as research for stories he was working on. An ancient mobile telephone takes up an unnecessary amount of space and he notices a box of business cards. His business cards.
His eyes stop at a framed photograph resting at an angle on the desk. There are two people in it, a woman and a boy.
Nora and Jonas.
He stares at them without seeing them clearly. Don’t smile. Please, don’t smile at me.
It’ll be all right. Don’t be scared. I’ll take care of you.
He reaches for the frame, picks it up and puts it down again.
Face down.
