Where Roses Never Die Read Free Page A

wasstruggling with a problem, perhaps several. But most of the people who came to visit me were. Why else would they come?
    She glanced around shyly as she stepped into the office. I held out my hand and introduced myself properly. She told me her name: Maja Misvær.
    I directed her to the client’s chair. No one else apart from me had sat there for many weeks. I walked round the desk, slumped down into the swivel chair, unfurled the gentlest expression I could muster and asked: ‘How can I help you?’
    She looked at me gloomily, as if the word help didn’t exist in her world. I could see my own face in hers, as though I was gazing into a mirror, the way it must have appeared to others over the last three years. Six months after Karin’s death I had walked in the funeral cortege for my old school friend, Paul Finckel. One of my oldest friends, and best sources of information in Bergen’s newspaper world, he had switched off his computer for good, without saving the contents for posterity. A newly employed colleague had taken it over before the corpse was cold. I felt my own demise had edged a step closer, like autumn announcing its arrival one frosty night in September. One by one they were leaving us, my old classmates. Soon there would only be a handful of us left. In the end, there would be none.
    ‘D-do you remember a little girl called Mette?’
    At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about. ‘Mette? I don’t know that I…’
    ‘She went missing in September 1977.’
    Then a light came on. ‘Ah, you mean that Mette.’
    Two Bergen children had gone missing in the 1970s. Both disappearances had shaken the local community and had initially kept the media busy, before being put on a back burner. In fact, I had helped to solve one of the cases, the 1979 one, some eight years later. The other case had never, to my knowledge, been cleared up. It became known as ‘The Mette Case’.
    She nodded.
    ‘But I don’t quite remember … when was it you said?’
    ‘17th September 1977.’
    I did some swift mental arithmetic: 1987, 1997, 2002. In six months the case would be time-barred, if someone had killed her, that is, and anything else was barely conceivable, bearing in mind how thorough the investigation had been. ‘And Mette, she was…?’
    ‘Yes, she is my daughter.’
    I noted the change of tense. ‘Could you … It’s so long ago … Could you refresh my memory about … the details?’
    She heaved a sigh, but nodded assent. ‘I can try. What I remember of it and what … I know.’

3
    The barely three-year-old Mette Misvær disappeared from her home in Solstølvegen in Nordås on Saturday 17th September, in the short space of time between twelve o’clock and a quarter past.
    ‘I was at home, busy with housework. Mette was sitting in a sandpit right outside the kitchen window. I kept peering out at regular intervals, but when she disappeared I was busy taking clothes out of the washing machine and putting them in the tumble dryer. As soon as I emerged from the laundry room I went to the window to check on Mette…’
    When she didn’t see her, at first she wasn’t initially that concerned. The house they lived in formed part of a yard with four other houses, and it was not at all unusual for children to move around this protected area, where cars only came in on very special occasions.
    ‘I thought that … perhaps some of the children from the other houses were outside playing and Mette had toddled over to join them…’
    She leaned over towards the window, but still couldn’t see Mette anywhere. Then she went from the kitchen to the front door and into the yard. She looked everywhere. ‘No children anywhere, neither Mette nor anyone else.’
    Then she went to the gate in the wooden fence on to Solstølvegen. The gate was closed. She opened it and walked out. Nothing. In the estate further to the west there were some adults walking around and pointing, and in the street below there