Charlotte
On my first day back I drive slowly around Wimbledon Village running errands, looking at all the familiar places I go to all the time. Everything is exactly the same and yet nothing is. I pull over several times simply because my heart is racing so badly I have no choice.
A police car is parked outside the Rose and Crown and, as I drive past, I’m convinced the officers catch a glimpse of me and instantly knew the truth – that I’m a killer. A ruthless and violent woman. I actually slow down and wait for the blue lights to sweep across the road, the loud beeps alerting all of Wimbledon to the murderer among them. Of course, nothing happens, and I continue home, my hands trembling violently on the wheel. I feel the need to check all the news channels for any mention of Maxime going missing, as I have done numerous times a day since that night, but there is nothing.
At home, too, everything is the same; the pristine, beautiful garden, the plumped-up cushions on every beige sofa, the total absence of a single speck of dust. Ayla knows dust drives me insane.
Everything is the same, except Madeleine is still in Norway, not due home for almost another week. I’m glad she’s away. She’s so perceptive, she’d take one look at me and realize something big has happened. Now, at least I have a week to fully regain my composure, move past the horrors of Ibiza and properly rebuild my life.
*
I get into bed to wait for Andreas. I’ve asked him to turn off whatever he’s watching and come upstairs to speak to me – we have to start having real conversations about our lack of intimacy. I muster up all my courage; it’s not like I haven’t tried to instigate these conversations before but this feels different. The stakes are higher.
Andreas appears in the doorway, looking drawn and pensive. I pat the bed and try to give him my best seductive look. He looks like a mouse that’s been deposited inside a hungry tiger’s cage. I try to build the image of what sex with my husband used to be like and find that I can’t. I actually don’t clearly remember. But I do remember what it was like with Bianka, how she moulded her entire body into mine, how she just fitted, all curves and dips and softness, and how she wouldn’t stop kissing me and laughing and kissing me more, like it was impossible not to. Before we met, I’d forgotten what it feels like to be wanted like that. I try to recall when Andreas was last like that with me, like he couldn’t get enough, but it’s so long ago, since before we had Oscar. He’s thirteen now and I don’t think we’ve had sex more than a handful of times since he was born. Is it so strange that I couldn’t resist the feeling of being wanted?
‘I missed you, honey,’ I say.
‘I missed you too.’
‘The whole thing with Anette and Mads’ divorce has made me think about how lucky you and I are.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, reaching across to squeeze my hand pleasantly but chastely, the way a father might.
‘But I think we need to start thinking about how we can re-establish more of a physical relationship.’ I’ve practised this conversation in my head all afternoon and Andreas reacts precisely how I assumed he would, wincing then dropping his gaze. It astonishes me that a man this conflict-shy and evasive could be as successful as he is in business. ‘Seriously, babe, it’s time we talk properly about it. I feel like you just don’t want to sleep with me. You don’t initiate sex and you turn me down when I do. I’ve tried to understand that you have a lot of stress at work. And that your needs might be different to mine, though it didn’t seem that way before. But I have needs, too. It’s been years, Andreas. Literally years. And I need you to hold me, you know? To touch me, and—’
‘Charlotte… Look. You’re right. I’m not sure how it’s happened this way. Just, when the kids were little, it was all just so crazy. It felt like you didn’t want me to touch you. And then, later, when they were older, it just felt like that part of our relationship was over.’
‘It doesn’t have to be, though.’
‘Maybe not. I’m sorry, Charlotte.’
‘I’m sorry, too. I just want to feel close to you.’ Andreas nods pensively, and runs a hand through his hair, then he moves a little closer to me on the bed. Then he kisses me. His kiss is hungry and hard and my heart begins to race as he tugs at my top and then my bra. We break apart for a moment and both laugh before kissing again. It happens so fast it’s almost as if my head can’t quite keep up, but for a few delicious minutes I forget everything except the feeling of being close, really close, to my husband, and I clutch him to me so hard I don’t immediately notice when he stops moving. I want him to keep going but it’s quickly obvious that he’s done. He flops over on his back next to me and we lie side by side staring up at the ceiling.
‘Wow, honey,’ he says, and leans across to kiss me again. ‘That was amazing.’ Then he gets up and puts his clothes back on and makes for the door. ‘I’m going to sleep down the hall. Early meeting with the guys from Zurich tomorrow.’ I smile at him and nod, in spite of feeling disappointed with the ending – at least it’s a giant leap in the right direction. I go back over the sex in my mind, how he felt, the way he kissed me and pinned me down beneath him.
And in spite of everything I suddenly miss the intensity and intimacy with Bianka. I bring myself to a quick but powerful climax at the thought of her beneath me in bed, wanting and laughing and available, always so focused on my pleasure. After, I feel ashamed and confused and dirty, and it takes me ages to fall asleep.
Thirty
Storm
He runs as fast as he can but he feels whoever is pursuing him getting closer and closer. He screams, but even in those moments he knows that nobody can hear him. The sounds are of his boots stomping on a gravel path, towering trees being shaken by a howling wind, the crunch of footsteps getting closer and closer, his wild screams. He turns around to see how close the baddy is now but he doesn’t get a chance, because the baddy is a giant looming above him, right there, and has managed to grab him by the hair on the back of his head and is flinging him to the ground like a ragdoll.
The last thing he hears before he wakes up, sweating and shaking in his bed, is a menacing voice hissing into his ear.
‘Listen to me, you little pig. I will snap your neck like a twig if you don’t do exactly what I say. Do you understand?’
The ping of an incoming text message jolts him awake. Just his dad, checking in. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, it’s only five o’clock in the afternoon, but he was exhausted to the bone after a long run up to Tryvann this morning.
Storm puts his phone down and stares into the soft afternoon gloom of his bedroom for a long while. He finds the drawings Lone handed him as he left the Blueberry Patch from where he keeps them in his bedside table and sits up in bed. She’d managed to uncover them along with his file in the nursery’s digital filing system. He stares at them, moving his gaze slowly from one to the next, for what seems like the hundredth time. And still, he can’t quite make sense of them.
In the first drawing is a little boy – himself – running through the woods alone. At the time he’d told Lone that he was running away from the baddy who threw his mother off a cliff. She’d found it very strange and had asked him gently about it several more times, and every time his story had been the same. Storm and his mother were in the woods on the crest of a mountain, walking on a narrow path when a baddy came and shoved his mother off the path. As Lone spoke, Madeleine’s hand closed tightly around Storm’s and he’d felt a rising panic in his chest at her words. But he remembered nothing.
In the second drawing, he’s still running but there is someone in the distance, though it’s just a stick figure. Storm had told Lone that the baddy was in the woods with him and that he’d had to hide. But then, in the third drawing, he’s drawn himself holding a curly-haired blond woman’s hand. Bianka. ‘I hope you’re still close,’ Lone had said as she hugged him goodbye, ‘I had the impression that she gave you a lot of love and affection after your mother died.’
He feels guilty, all of a sudden, for all his criticism of Bianka. It was there on paper for anyone to see – his own childhood interpretation of an adult who’d clearly stepped in to take care of him.
Perhaps it hadn’t been so easy for her, either, though he’s never thought about it like that before. He pores over the drawings again for a long while. He tries to recover a sliver of memory from the moments the drawings came into being, where was he sitting, how did the pencil feel in the crook of his hand, if he was angry with himself for not managing to draw any straight lines. But no memory remains.
He feels so lonely and cut off from everything that when the sky has weakened into shades of violet and pink, Storm gets up on impulse. He runs all the way to Slemdal station, passing a few boys he knew from his old school, barely slowing down to high five them as he goes. Since St Anton, Storm rarely walks down the street in this part of Oslo without being recognized or congratulated.
He rides the subway to the central station, then changes for the southeast-bound number 19 tram. He slumps back in his seat, mindlessly scrolling on his phone. He feels unhinged, like he could burst into tears at any moment, and for the first time he can remember, a visceral yearning, specifically for his mother, washes over him. Now he touches upon something resembling a memory; it’s a feeling rather than an image, of her presence, her love, of finally bridging something of the distance between them.
When he arrives at the house in Mosseveien, all the lights are off, and Storm realizes that his grandparents have of course gone to bed. He lifts his finger to the doorbell – he has no choice, but he hesitates at the thought of his grandmother being startled awake and frightened at the sound of the bell, and his grandfather painfully and slowly making his way down the stairs. But Storm has nowhere else to go. Just as he’s about to press it, the door opens and his grandmother is standing there, a faint smile on her face. She pulls him inside, then into her arms.
Thirty-One
Bianka
In the three days since they returned from Ibiza, Bianka has barely slept. Not even the sleeping pills she stockpiles from America succeed in lulling her into a state of real rest. Long into the night she lies tossing and turning until Emil groans and mumbles, ‘Come on, B, I have to get up in a couple of hours,’ then moves further away from her. Sometimes she gets up from the bed and sits a while downstairs, scrolling on her phone, checking her messages. Nothing from Charlotte today. Bianka has messaged her several times and the messages have the little blue ticks next to them showing they’ve been read by the recipient, but still no response. She finally responded to something yesterday, basically fobbing her off with a vague promise of a ‘coffee next week’, but Bianka isn’t stupid. She knows what’s happening.
Every time Bianka thinks about it or checks her phone only to find she still hasn’t heard back from her, an immense fury continues to build, filling all that empty space inside her. She watches Charlotte’s most recent Instagram reel, lifted from the UK Streamstar release, which is already proving a big hit, posted the day after their return, another vacuous rant about the unparalleled dangers of low-fat products, seed oils, and carbs. She’s a natural on camera, smiling and joking, and so very beautiful, appearing completely unaffected. One wouldn’t have thought she’d thrown a dead man into the Mediterranean just days before.
But Bianka isn’t as unaffected as she assumed she would be. Bianka feels as though she is dying herself, poisoned from an invisible pinprick wound that has unleashed deadly bacteria into her bloodstream. She feels constantly sick to her stomach, her head hurts so badly it’s as though she’s banged it repeatedly against the wall, and she’s tortured by a nonstop stream of mental images of the final hour before Maxime went to his ocean grave. The sound of the kettlebell striking bone, the disgusting cool stickiness of his insides as she shoved the weights into his stomach cavity. Bianka wants to take a pill that will make her sleep for a week. Or forever.
She endlessly replays the last moments with Charlotte, how she’d driven both Bianka and Anette home from the airport and deliberately dropped Bianka off first to avoid being alone with her even though she actually lives closer to the Vinges than Anette does. The telling thing was the screech of tires that hollered down Dunstall Road as she drove off in her gleaming Range Rover – she just couldn’t get away from her fast enough, that was obvious. Bianka had stood on the curb, clutching the handle of her wheelie bag in her clammy fist, fighting off both waves of nausea and frustrated tears, and feeling the instant hot sting of fury.
You might think you can dump me like a hot potato, but it doesn’t work like that, she’d thought to herself. Emil had opened the door and helped her inside, kissing the top of her head and fussing over her, and she’d let herself be held, if only to gain some time to recover an acceptable facial expression. Since she’s been back, she’s helped herself to wine even more liberally than usual at dinner; Emil notices but says nothing. On the second day, she took the train to Vauxhall and walked up to a quiet residential street bordering Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens where she met with a young man who waited for her in a red Alfa Romeo, his long legs stretching out of the open door and resting on the pavement. He handed her a generous measure of cocaine and some amphetamines, too. It’s the first time in many years that she has bought drugs, and the first in London, and it wasn’t easy to find a drug dealer when you’re trying to look like a respectable lady in Wimbledon Village. In the end, she’d asked a couple of gangly youths smoking in an alley near the Odeon in town, reassuring them she wasn’t a cop or from social services, and slipped them two rolled-up twenty-pound notes, and they’d given her the number for this guy, who went by the name Dinky.
