Burned

Henning met Nora Klemetsen while he worked for Kapital and she was a rookie business journalist on Aftenposten. They ran into each other at a press conference. It was a run of the mill event, no drama, merely the announcement of some company’s annual results with so little headline-grabbing potential that they only warranted a paragraph in Dagens N?ringsliv and a right-hand column on page 17 in Finansavisen the next day. He happened to sit down next to Nora. He was there to profile one of the senior executives who would be retiring shortly. They yawned their way through the presentation, started giggling at their respective and increasingly hopeless attempts at disguising their boredom, and decided to go for a drink afterwards to recover.

They were both in relationships; she was living — semi-seriously — with a stockbroker, while he had an on-off thing going with a stuck-up corporate lawyer. But that first evening was so enjoyable, so free from awkwardness that they went for another drink the next time they found themselves covering the same story. He had had many girlfriends, but he had never known someone who was so easy to be with. Their tastes were compatible in so many ways, it bordered on scary.

They both liked grainy mustard with their sausages, not the usual bottled Idun rubbish. Neither of them liked tomatoes all that much, but they both loved ketchup. They liked the same type of films, and never had protracted arguments in the video store or outside the cinema. Neither of them liked spending the summer in hot foreign places when Norway offered rock faces and fresh prawns. Friday was Taco day. Eating anything else on a Friday was simply unthinkable.

And, gradually, they both realised they couldn’t live without each other.

Three and half years later they were married, exactly nine months afterwards Jonas arrived and they were as happy as two sleep-deprived career people in their late twenties can be, when their life is a plank full of splinters. Not enough sleep, too few breaks, minimum understanding of each other’s needs — both at home and at work — more and more rows, less and less time and energy to be together. In the end, neither of them could take any more.

Parents. The best and the worst human beings can become.

And now her arm is entwined with another man’s. Unprofessional, he thinks, flirting at a press conference. And Nora spots him halfway through a fit of laughter. She stops immediately, as though something is stuck in her throat. They look at each other for what seems like forever.

He blinks first. Vidar Larsen, who works for NTB, touches his shoulder and says ‘hi, so you’re back, Henning?’ He nods and decides to follow Vidar; he says nothing, but he makes sure he get as far away from Nora as he can, looking no one in the eye, following feet and footsteps through doors he could find blindfolded. He takes a seat at the back of the press room where he can watch the back of other people’s heads rather than vice versa. The room fills up quickly. He sees Nora and Corduroy enter together. They sit next to each other, quite a long way forward.

So, Nora, we meet again.

And, once again, we meet at a press conference.

Chapter 8

Three uniformed officers enter, two men and a woman. Henning instantly recognises the two men: Chief Inspector Arild Gjerstad and Detective Inspector Bjarne Brogeland.

Bjarne and Henning went to school together in Klofta. They were never best friends, even though they were in the same year. That might have been enough to start a friendship back then. But it takes more. Chemistry and compatibility, for example.

Later, Henning also discovered that Bjarne was a Romeo whose ambition was to sleep with as many girls as possible, and when he started turning up at the Juuls’, it wasn’t hard to decipher Bjarne’s true intentions. Luckily, Henning’s sister, Trine, was on to him and Henning avoided having to play the part of Protective Older Brother, but his loathing of Bjarne stayed with him throughout their adolescence.

And now Bjarne is a policeman.

*

Not that this is news to Henning. Both of them applied to the police academy in the 1990s. Bjarne was accepted. Henning wasn’t. He was rejected long before the admission process even started, because he suffered from every allergy known to man, and had had asthma as a child. Bjarne, however, was the physically robust type. Twenty-twenty vision and great stamina. He had been an athlete when he was younger, and performed quite well in heptathlons. Henning seems to recall that Bjarne pole-vaulted over 4.50 metres.