Good riddance, she thought, and tasted blood in her mouth – she’d bitten her lip out of sheer anxiety. Now get yourself home. Nice and steady. Whoever that was, he was probably just playing a stupid joke on you. Maybe he was drunk.
Someone else will take care of him.
He’s not your problem now.
Yet whatever she told herself, her pulse kept racing, as if she instinctively knew the threat hadn’t subsided. Suddenly, another set of lights flashed into view ahead of her, in the opposite lane, at the far end of the road.
She heard a clattering noise in front of her, much closer than the Jeep, and she woke up with a start. Water was flowing over her head, her face, her body. Bewildered, she found herself standing in the shower and realised her bottle of shampoo had fallen noisily to the floor, bringing her back to the here and now. She’d been dreaming. The now-tepid water must have made her drowsy, but the fact she’d nearly nodded off in the shower from sheer exhaustion seemed utterly irrelevant. You remembered something. The moments before your accident. There was a car – a Jeep – and then . . .
Then you woke up. Jasmin picked up the shampoo. Stupid bottle. But still, it’s progress.
You’re on the right track. It was a good idea to come here. The new surroundings are stimulating your thoughts and you’re going to remember, like you hoped. It’s all going to come back to you.
Including the truth.
Yes, maybe even the truth.
You need to find the triangle. The upside-down triangle with the open top-right corner. You know it from the night of your accident – and you know you’ve seen it before on Minsøy too.
But where? That particular detail remained stubbornly elusive, as if her memory was shrouded in dense fog.
Jasmin dried herself off. Out in the corridor, the air was thick with the smell of smoke from the fires she’d lit in the house’s two wood burners.
She checked on Paul, who was sleeping peacefully. The small waxing moon was shining through his window, bathing the astronauts and rockets on his duvet in a faint silver light. The book she’d been reading to him over the last few days was lying on the bedside table: a story about a boy called Max who visits some friends and embarks on a wild adventure.
Paul must have woken up and fetched it from the box. That was unusual.
There were three origami figures on the windowsill. A swan, another bird – maybe an eagle – and a cat.
He’s really talented. My little artist.
Jasmin tiptoed out of the bedroom. Small droplets of water fell from her damp hair and dripped onto the rough floorboards. Plop, plop. The noise continued as she suddenly stopped.
Something had caught her attention – something that had been nagging at her all evening, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was.
The door of the wardrobe at the end of the corridor was still ajar.
It had been worming away at her – ticking over in her subconscious for hours – but only now did she realise it had to do with the dead fox and this wardrobe. Jasmin walked over to it. The wardrobe was made of pale birchwood, polished and cool to the touch. The door creaked quietly when she put her hand on it and there was a dark brass key in the lock.
She froze. A key in the lock . . . If the fox had been inside this wardrobe and had only been dead for a couple of days, that meant someone must have locked it in there. Or was there another explanation? Of course there was: somebody had visited the house and left the corpse here. Somebody who knew Jasmin was coming.
Are you certain the wardrobe was locked? Paul never mentioned it; all he said was that Bonnie had found the fox. Nothing about a key. But wouldn’t the fox have run away if the door had been unlocked?
Did someone really put a dead fox in there?
And if they did, wouldn’t that be so much worse?
Why would anybody do that?
Jasmin pulled back the covers on her bed but felt far too tense and nervous to go to sleep. Her mind kept working, as if countless gears were grinding away in there, reshaping all her thoughts.
You remembered something, she thought again. That’s why you’re here: to finally shed a little light on the darkness, to finally understand what really happened on the night of the accident and to track down that triangle. And you remembered something. Only a small part of the picture – but where one fragment emerges, more will follow.
An animal. Sven Birkeland’s words sprang to her mind. They’d found clear evidence on her car: fur, blood. It was an open-and-shut case, and yet . . .
You know something isn’t right. You can almost remember – early in the morning, during those moments between sleep and wakefulness, you know deep down . . .
That that isn’t what happened.
That it wasn’t just a deer out there on the road in the storm, in the driving rain.
It was a man.
You killed a human being that night.
Jasmin woke with a start once more, gasping for breath. Sweat lay in a cool, damp film on her forehead; her trembling fingers gripped the rumpled bedclothes.
Then she heard it.
A noise from out back. It was the narrow gate that separated her garden from the track through the woods behind the house. You locked it behind you when you buried the fox. You definitely did.
Jasmin threw the duvet aside and leapt out of bed. The floor was cold beneath her feet, the woodgrain rough and uneven in places, and she knew very well that she’d pick up a few splinters if she wasn’t careful. The carving knife she’d taken down into the cellar earlier was lying on the bedside table. Did you leave it there? She couldn’t remember, but she grabbed it now, took it with her and held it out in front of her, ready to defend herself. Cautiously, she pushed the blind aside and peered through the window: down in the garden, almost hidden by the tree trunks and yet treacherously illuminated in the pale glow emanating from the thin strip of moon, she saw the silhouette of a man.
Whoever it was, he was staring up at her.
She was certain of it.
Jasmin felt a cry of terror welling up in her throat. The stranger’s eyes met her own, and at the last moment she managed to swallow her scream.
He can’t see you. It’s dark in the bedroom. You can see him, but – no, he can’t see you. So don’t scream, don’t give yourself away. Think. What should you do?
Yet before she could stir, the silent observer turned on his heel and slipped abruptly into the woods, following the path away from the house until he disappeared from view amid the towering birch trees.
Jasmin felt a sharp pain in her right hand. In her anxiety, she’d gripped the knife slightly too far up and her hand had slipped off the handle, causing the blade to slice into her skin. Blood was dripping onto the windowsill, red on white, like the tracks of a wounded animal through fresh snow.
In the kitchen she found some bandages and sat down at the table to tend to her injury under the light of the incandescent bulb.
‘You aren’t ready to do this alone,’ Jørgen had said.
‘I’m ready. I have to be.’
‘At least let me follow you up there and check up on you. You don’t have to go through any of this on your own.’ He’d embraced her tenderly and held her for a long time, as if he never wanted to let her go.
‘I know you’d do anything to help me through this,’ she’d replied. ‘But there are times when we have to settle things on our own. You know me – almost better than I know myself.’