Thursday 13 November, 07:30
At seven-thirty the lock buzzed and Mona Hellesøy came in out of the rain, shaking a red umbrella. Coat on the third hook. Machine on. A Tupperware box set on the reception desk, lid already off, the smell of cardamom and cinnamon reaching the window before she did. Skillingsboller, a dozen of them, glazed and still faintly warm.
Then she saw him.
“You’re early,” she said.
“I never went home.” Viktor nodded at the chair opposite. “Not the meeting room. Here’s fine.”
She sat on the front edge of the seat, handbag on her knees, both hands on the clasp. Her phone she set down on the desk beside the box, face-down, out of what looked like long habit. Her eyes were swollen, but she had done her hair.
He had the printout of the mailbox rule in his inside pocket, folded behind the list of forty-one names. He left it there.
“Kristin said you weren’t well yesterday.”
“My head. It comes with the weather.” She touched her temple. “It’s better. I couldn’t stay at home, not with everything. Somebody has to put the coffee on.” She looked at the boller. “Will you have one? Nobody ate the last ones.”
“Later. I’ve been looking at the reception PC, Mona.”
“That old thing.” Something easy came into her face, a woman on firm ground. “Everyone uses it. The couriers sign for things on it. Jonas uses it when his own is doing one of its updates. Geir used to tell me off for not locking it, and he was right, I never did.” She smiled a little. “I’m not clever with computers, Viktor. Ask anyone in this building.”
“Someone made a rule on the alert inbox. From that machine.”
“I don’t know what that is.” Steady. Polite. The voice she used on the phone to municipalities who hadn’t paid. “If something has gone wrong with it, I’m very sorry, but anyone could have sat down there. It’s right by the door. Half of Bergen comes through that door.”
On the desk, between the Tupperware and her handbag, the phone buzzed once against the wood.
Neither of them looked at it.
“The sixteenth of September,” Viktor said. “Twenty to twelve. Jonas was at lunch. You were alone out here.”
She held his eyes. He watched her decide to hold them.
“Then I suppose I was eating my sandwich at my desk,” she said, “as I do every day. I’m sorry. I can’t remember a day in September. Can you?”
It was good. It was better than most of what he had sat across from in Oslo. He looked at the hands on the clasp of the handbag, which had not moved.
“How much is it, Mona?”
The coffee machine cleared its throat. She looked at the boller, as if they might answer for her.
Then the hands came off the clasp.
“One million four hundred thousand,” she said. “Roughly. It was Arvid’s business first. The van, the lease on the workshop. Then Arvid went to Stavanger and the loans stayed here with me.” She tried a laugh and it didn’t come out. “I’m sixty-one. I bake for people’s birthdays. And the bank owns more of my flat than I do.”
“When did they find you?”
“Early August. On LinkedIn.” She said the word carefully, like a foreign place. “A very polite young man. Better Nynorsk than mine.”
“And at first it was small.”
“At first it was nothing. Weeks of nothing. Just talking, kind talking. Then who works with what. Who’s on holiday when. Things anybody could know.” A tear ran down beside her nose and she didn’t seem to notice it. “Then, at the end of August, a little memory stick, to put in the computer here. Just once. A monitoring tool, he said, for an audit. I knew it was not. I did it anyway.”
“And then money.”
“Two hundred thousand. A loan, it said. A refinancing, from a lending company, with a contract and a logo and a nice girl on the telephone. The bank didn’t blink at it.” Her mouth twisted. “Afterwards I looked for the company. There is no company. And I slept that night. A whole night, the first in a year.”
“The rule.”
“That was September. He sent me the steps. With pictures, one after the other. Like a recipe.” She closed her eyes. “I told myself it was only emails. Only stopping some noise. Everybody here complains about the noise.”
Viktor waited. Then he asked the thing he least wanted the answer to.
“Did Geir know?”
The composure did not crack so much as fold, all at once, like a deckchair.
“He’d started to, I think.” Her voice had gone north, the vowels rounding. “Last week he came to my desk. He asked me, very kind, why I had been logged on so late one evening. I said the invoices. He looked at me a long time. He didn’t accuse me. He was a Florø boy, you know. An hour up the road from where I grew up. Sometimes he talked to me in dialect, when nobody was listening.” She pressed a napkin to her mouth. “He just looked sad. As if he was disappointed, but mostly for me. And then on Monday he died, and the police came, and everybody was saying murder, and God forgive me, my first thought, my very first thought, was: now no one will look at me.”
“Mona. At eight o’clock Line Dahl from the police is going to come through that door. She’ll caution you, and you’ll tell her everything you’ve just told me, properly, on the record, and I’ll sit beside you while you do. That will matter later.”
She nodded into the napkin.
Dahl came at four minutes to eight with the rain on her shoulders. She looked at Mona, and at Viktor, and at the boller, and took off her coat without a word. In the meeting room she set her phone to record, gave the caution, and asked the same questions Viktor had, and some he hadn’t. Mona answered all of them.
When it was done, Mona sat with her hands open on the table, emptied out.
“Her phone,” Viktor said. “It’s still on the desk out front.”
They went back out together. The phone lay where she had put it, face-down beside the cooling buns.
Viktor looked at Mona. She nodded.
He turned it over.
A notification on the lock screen, small and white. An app called Session. One sender.
Skarv.