I steel myself and return Inspector Fuentes’ call. He sounds like a pleasant enough guy and asks a couple of standard questions about when I was last in Ibiza, what I was doing there. He asks whether I am aware of the fact that my neighbours’ son has gone missing. I hesitate for a moment, and then decide to pretend I had no idea because otherwise it must seem suspicious that I haven’t already been in touch. We agree that I’ll sit down with Fuentes on Zoom for an ‘informal chat’ tomorrow morning. He says he wants to speak to all of the guests who were staying at Can Xara during the week prior to Dubois-Joseph’s mysterious disappearance, so I give him the contact details for Anette, Linda, and quickly decide to give him Bianka’s details too – not like I have any choice.
‘Have you ever met Maxime Dubois-Joseph?’ he asks.
I chance being vague, saying I’m not sure, that I might have, years ago. A long silence ensues and I can hear the furious scratch of Inspector Fuentes’ pen in the background. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
We hang up and I text the girls to say the police will be getting in touch.
*
I drive fast over to Bianka’s house on Dunstall Road. All the blinds upstairs are down but her ice-blue Range Rover Velar is in the driveway. I knock on the door but the house is completely silent. I realize I haven’t spoken to Bianka since our phone call the other night and I said I’d message her the next day to make plans to meet this week. I haven’t. My stomach turns again at the thought of what happened between us. That I’ve actually jeopardized my entire, big life for this woman I barely know; now, in hindsight, it seems completely insane. My only excuse is that my hunger for touch and attention was so powerful that it disabled my better judgment. And now we find ourselves in a situation where we need to make sure our stories are watertight for the police.
I start as the door opens a crack and Bianka stands in front of me, her face very pale, her usually wild hair greasy and pulled back into a tight ponytail.
‘Charlotte. You came.’ She looks pathetically grateful to see me.
‘Hi. Yes. Can I come in? We need to talk.’
Bianka lets me into the house and I lean in and give her a hug, but even though I do my best to act normal, she must feel my coldness.
‘The police called,’ I say.
‘Oh, my God,’ says Bianka.
‘I know. That’s why I’m here. We need to make sure we tell them exactly the same thing. As close to nothing as possible.’
‘Obviously. But I feel like you’ve just drifted away completely. You said you were going to call. That we’d meet up this week. This would be so much easier to deal with if I felt we were on the same team, like before.’
‘We are on the same team. Of course we are.’
‘Well, since we’ve been back it certainly hasn’t felt like it. It feels like you’re keeping me sweet to make sure I don’t tell everyone what happened between us or that you killed Maxime.’
‘Hey.’
‘That’s how it feels.’
‘We made a pact. We agreed to never talk about it again. So don’t say things like that.’
‘I can’t cope without you, Charlotte,’ says Bianka, bursting into tears. I am so repulsed by her and by this entire shitshow of a situation that it takes all my mental and emotional energy to pull her close until her sobs subside. I pat her back and try not to think about the tears slipping from her eyes into my hair and onto my clothes as we embrace. Eventually I pull back.
‘Look. We both need to focus on not freaking out. I need to know that we are both fully in agreement about what we say to the police. As little as possible. Then, when all this has gone away, we can, uh, maybe we could go away together. Reconnect.’ I don’t know why I say it; even as I speak, my words sound hollow and contrived, like they prove exactly what Bianka is accusing me of – that I’m trying to keep her sweet so she won’t ruin my entire life. Which is, of course, the truth.
‘Really?’ she asks. ‘You’d want that?’
I nod, then I squeeze her shoulder, another odd and awkward moment, and then I step back outside.
Thirty-Seven
Storm
They’ve turned off the main road and are heading down the smaller gravelled track toward the few cabins scattered across the remote valley of Nissedal, when Storm turns to his father.
‘Can we drive up to that parking lot at the end of Fyresdal, just where that really steep path leads up onto the mountain?’
‘What? No, why would we—’
‘I want to see where it happened.’ Ever since the thought occurred to him, Storm had known he had to go there himself. Could it be that returning to the exact place would recover his memory so he could move forward? He knows what happened to Mia. She went out hiking as she often did and fell down one of the steepest parts of the mountain and died instantly. As of recently, he also knows that he was there and saw it happen. But he doesn’t remember any of it, and maybe seeing the spot could change that.
‘Storm. Look. I’m getting increasingly concerned with your focus on this. I understand that you’re hurting and that it must be very difficult to not be able to remember much, but—’
‘I do remember some stuff, Dad. I just need to understand my memories. You guys lied to me. I have a right to know what really happened that day.’ Storm thinks about the drawings and what he’d told Lone.
Emil sighs, then nods dejectedly.
‘Please. I just want to see it. I looked on Google Earth and it seems like it’s only about ten minutes’ walk from that parking spot. Please, Dad.’
Emil reverses the car back up the track and then makes a three-point turn. Within fifteen minutes he parks the Tesla in the empty parking spot beneath the heavily forested southern face of Rasletind mountain, where twelve years ago, Mia Langeland fell to her death with her little boy as the only witness.
‘Show me where it happened,’ says Storm, walking away from the car up the steep rocky path. Emil hesitates and rubs absentmindedly at the stubble on his jaw, then he follows behind Storm. The path is too narrow to walk side by side and very badly eroded, sending chunks of mud and rocks crumbling as Emil and Storm slowly labour their way upwards. Any steeper, and we’d have to climb, thinks Storm. After less than fifteen minutes, the path merges with another more solid gravel path rising toward the summit from another access point in the valley, and after a couple of sharp bends, they reach a spectacular viewpoint giving wide, dramatic views of the empty, silent valley. From where they stand, they can see the path continuing along the shoulder of the mountain further up in a treacherous stretch, and though there is a rope fence nailed to the rockface intended to hold on to, it’s obviously a dangerous spot.
‘Up there,’ whispers Emil. ‘That’s where it happened.’ Storm nods and turns his gaze from where he and his mother must have stood, to the rocky slope where she must have landed, dizzyingly far below. Storm envisions Mia down there, broken and bleeding and how he would, no doubt, have been able to see her. What must it have been like for him, standing there, in those moments after she’d tripped and fallen? Did Mia scream, her voice hollering up the mountainsides? Storm doesn’t miraculously recover his memory of those moments, or what happened next. He feels sobered and deeply disturbed by seeing the place his mother died. He wants to lie down in his dark, safe room and regain control of his thoughts.
‘Dad. I want to go home now.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry, I can only imagine—’
‘Now, please.’ Storm walks as fast as he safely can along the track back down to the car, his father hot on his heels.
‘I was thinking we could grill hot dogs over the firepit,’ says Emil, restarting the car engine, avoiding looking at Storm. ‘If it doesn’t start to rain.’
