The Fourth Man by K.O. Dahl Page B

Faremo has gone into hiding. Lying low. She must have panicked. At any rate, she packed a rucksack on the same day her brother and his pals were set free at the hearing. I haven’t a clue where she went or why she disappeared. She hasn’t turned up again now that her brother is dead and that’s a little strange, isn’t it? On top of that, Reidun Vestli went off sick at the same time as Elisabeth packed her rucksack and went on the run. And Reidun Vestli wasn’t at home when I rang her a few hours later. She was driving somewhere. When I did eventually get hold of her, I was left with the impression she knew where Elisabeth was. I somehow feel the two of them are complicit.’
    ‘Perhaps Elisabeth Faremo has run away from you?’
    Now it was Frølich’s turn to sigh heavily. ‘Her brother’s dead. She’s still in hiding.’
    The silence hung in the air between them. Gunnarstranda broke it: ‘Why would Elisabeth Faremo ally herself with Reidun Vestli?’
    ‘She and Elisabeth are, or have been, an item. This Reidun Vestli sees me as a masculine avenger from the heterosexual world. And the woman can’t see anything wrong with Elisabeth disappearing, despite the fact that Elisabeth has a key role in this murder case and her brother is dead. The woman cannot connect her relationship with reality. I feel she’s Elisabeth’s willing collaborator right now.’
    ‘What would your interest in this be – if I talk to Vestli?’
    ‘Mine?’ Frølich shrugged his shoulders. ‘As you can see, I’m in a bit of a cleft stick. Obviously, it would be fascinating to know what Reidun Vestli has to say when you flash your police badge and take a hard line with her.’

14
     
    After Gunnarstranda had got into his car and driven off, Frank Frølich waited for a while and looked at the weather. He thought about physical intimacy on dark autumn evenings, when car head-lamps struggle to penetrate the mist, when frost quivers like a circular rainbow for a brief instant in the light of street lamps. He thought about knitted gloves and intertwined fingers.
    He tore himself away, went back to his car and drove until he came to the afore-mentioned side road just before Askim. There he turned and followed the winding gravel road, searching for a tractor track leading to the river and imagining how natural it would have been to park. In the end, he gave up and pulled over onto the gravel verge just before a copse. On the right-hand side of the road, there was a large field with straw stubble in neat rows protruding through the hoar frost. The field ended in a dark hillside overlooking the river. He wandered across the field. The frost crunched beneath his shoes. He reached the trees and stopped in front of a birch. The branches were covered with tiny ice-thorns; each bough resembled a carefully designed decoration. He looked down and ran his shoe along a branch of a raspberry bush; the ice-thorns came off with a dry rasping sound. The ice covering the spruce trees transformed the mountain ridge into a matt light-green surface. Further into the wood, there was the same formation of ice on withered stems, dead fern leaves and cranberry heath. Every cranberry leaf was wreathed in small ball-shaped ice crystals. A birch caught by the sun had been forced to relinquish its ice costume, which lay like granular snow on the forest floor.
    He went on, across the blueberry heath and moss blanket, down towards the river. Soon he could hear the water. The noise increased in volume and became an impenetrable roar. He walked out onto a crag and stared down into the foaming water. This had to be the horizontal waterfall Gunnarstranda had been talking about. The water in the ravine coiled into a green-grey spume, smashed against the mountainside with enormous power, was hurled back and thundered on. Further down, the heavy mass of water pitched around like the backbone of a ferocious animal, laying bare fierce, capricious back eddies, which flowed away and