map. I drove slowly and carefully up the bad road to Kollen and parked at the turning place. Annie suddenly looked worried. She left her bag on the floor of my car. I try to remember what I was thinking at that moment, but I can't. I remember only that we trudged up the overgrown path. Annie was tall and straight-backed, walking beside me, young and steadfast, yet not unimpressionable. She went with me down to the water and sat hesitantly on a rock. Plucked at her fingers for a while. I remember her short fingernails and the little ring on her left hand.
"I saw you," she said quietly. "7 saw you through the window. Right when you bent over the table. I ran away. Later Papa told me that Eskil was dead."
"I knew you were accusing me," I told her sombrely, "because of the way you've been acting. Every day when we met on the street or at the letterboxes or by the garage. You were accusing me."
I started to cry. I leaned forward and sobbed into my lap while Annie sat motionless at my side. She didn't say anything, but when I was done, I glanced up and saw that she had been crying too. I felt better than I had for a long time, I really did. A warm breeze was stroking my back, and there was still hope.
"What should I do?" I whispered then. "What should I do in order to put this behind me?"
She looked at me with her grey eyes, almost in surprise. "Turn yourself in to the police, of course. And tell them the truth. Otherwise you'll never find peace!"
At that moment she looked at me. My heart turned to stone in my chest. I put my hands in my pockets, tried hard to keep them there. "Have you told this to anyone?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "Not yet"
"You should mind your own business, Annie!" I shrieked in desperation. Suddenly I felt as if I were rising up from the bottom, out of the darkness and into the light. A single paralysing thought occurred to me. That Annie was the only person in the whole world who knew about this. It was as if the wind had turned and was now roaring in my ears. Everything was lost. Her face wore the same astonished expression Eskil's face had. Afterwards I walked swiftly through the woods. I didn't turn around even once to look back at her.
Johnas studied the curtains and the fluorescent light on the ceiling as he kept on shaping his lips to form words that wouldn't come. Sejer looked at him. "We've searched your house and secured the forensic evidence. You will be charged with the negligent homicide of your own son, Eskil Johnas, and the premeditated murder of Annie Sofie Holland. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"You're wrong!"
His voice was a fragile peep. Several burst blood vessels had given his eyes a reddish sheen.
"I'm not the one who will assess your guilt."
Johnas stuck his fingers in his shirt pocket, searching for something. He was shaking so violently that he looked like an old man. Finally he pulled out a flat little metal box.
"My mouth is so dry," he said.
Sejer stared at the box. "But you didn't have to kill her, you know."
"What are you talking about?" he said faintly.
"You didn't have to kill Annie. She would have died on her own if you'd just waited a little longer."
"Are you joking?"
"No," Sejer said. "I would never joke about cancer of the liver."
"You must be mistaken. Nobody was healthier than Annie. She was standing by the water when I stood up and left, and the last thing I heard was the sound of a stone that she threw into the water. I didn't dare tell you the first time, that she actually went all the way up to the lake with me. But that's what happened! She didn't want to drive back with me; she wanted to walk instead. Don't you see that someone must have turned up while she was standing there at the lake? A young girl, alone in the woods. It's crawling with tourists up at Kollen. Does it ever occur to you that you might be mistaken?"
"It does occur to me on rare occasions. But you have to understand that you've lost the battle. We found Halvor."
Johnas grimaced, as if someone had stuck a needle in his ear.