Read The Writing on the Wall for Free Online

class list … But why …?’
    ‘Listen, Sidsel … Is it all right if I call you by your first name?’
    She nodded.
    ‘Helene Sandal suggested that Torild may sometimes have looked as if she was on drugs …’
    She reached out for her coffee cup then changed her mind. ‘Oh, that … It was never … We never got to the bottom of that.’
    ‘But she called the two of you in to a meeting.’
    ‘Yes. But only I went.’
    ‘Your husband …’
    She pursed her lips slightly. ‘Holger was busy. It was in the evening anyway, and he was usually working late.’
    ‘But it didn’t lead to anything?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Did you speak to Torild about it afterwards?’
    ‘Of course! But she consistently denied it. She said it was just something Miss Sandal had dreamed up because she didn’t like her. Or because she wasn’t satisfied with her schoolwork. I couldn’t …’ She looked at me with her large blue eyes. ‘I couldn’t force an answer out of her, could I?’
    ‘Did she call you again later?’
    ‘Yes, she did, and we got the same lecture as before, with the same results.’
    ‘Didn’t all this make you suspicious?’
    ‘Suspicious? I was anxious, obviously! After all, you had … You obviously know what it’s like yourself. Waiting up at night wondering whether she’ll come home or not, where she is, who she’s with. Thinking the worst, as we always do in such circumstances … I can’t count the times I’ve seen her in my mind’s eye, bleeding, beaten up, victim of a rape or a car crash.’
    ‘And when she does finally get back, you’re so pleased nothing ’s happened that you forgive her for being late, that she smells of beer and cigarettes, and that you’ve no idea where she’s been. Because when you ask, she just replies … “Here and there’.”
    ‘Different places, you mean?’
    ‘Yes. A party. Disco. Hamburger joint.’
    ‘No pattern?’
    ‘No. And you think of her when she was little, how happy you were when she was born – she was the first, after all! – the clothes you got for her, the first shoes, the gold lacquer ones over there on the shelf …’
    I glanced over at them. They were no larger than a doll’s.
    ‘All these photos – I must have at least twenty albums altogether , Veum! The first day at nursery school, then at primary school, always happy and smiling, but then … Her confirmation last year, when she insisted on a civil ceremony, and Holger was so cross he hardly spoke to her for six months. You can almost see it in the picture we took. The flash of defiance in her face. Triumphant defiance.’
    She stood up, walked over to the bookshelves, picked up the photograph and stood there for a moment looking at it, before she brought it over to me. As I examined it, she fetched two more and sat down beside me.
    ‘Look at this’, she said, holding one of them up. It showed a girl three or four years old, with blonde, slightly curly hair and a little summer dress with flowers on it, taken on a bench in a park somewhere with her small legs sticking straight out in the air and such a happy smile that you could almost hear her gurgling with laughter. ‘That’s how she was then. And here …’
    In the next picture she was older, about ten or eleven, wearing a Guides uniform, looking slightly more self-conscious perhaps, her hair a touch darker, but with just as big a smile.
    ‘But then …’ She pointed at the photograph I had in my hands. It showed a serious-looking young woman, with short scruffy hair, with no hint of a smile around her sullen lips and a darkness in her eyes that had not been present in the other photographs.
    The three stages of childhood, like in a painting by Edvard Munch. And in the last one, she was already almost an adult.
    I helped myself to another sandwich. ‘I think I asked you this yesterday, but … She hasn’t had any boyfriends yet, has she?’
    She blushed slightly as though the word awakened unpleasant memories. ‘She’s never