Burned

She is much thinner than when he last saw her. She was slim when she gave evidence in court, but now she is practically a skeleton. Her clothes hang on her like rags. She has aged ten years, at least. Her skin sags. She is a zombie, he thinks. Her teeth are stained yellow from years of smoking and her hair has started to go grey. It is tied back into a hasty ponytail; strands of damp hair fall over her face, a pale, gaunt face with large bags under her eyes.

‘W-who are you?’ she stutters.

He looks at Yngve in the ground. His head has flopped. But he is breathing.

‘My name’s Henning Juul,’ he says with as much control in his voice as he can muster. He can see that the name means nothing to her.

‘I reported on your court case. Before this happened,’ he says, pointing to his face, thinking that the scarring might earn him some sympathy points.

‘What are you doing? Why are you here?’

Her voice is sharper now. He looks at Yngve.

‘Don’t do it, Ingvild,’ he says. ‘Deep down, you don’t really want to do it.’

‘Oh yes, I do,’ she snarls. ‘What have I got to live for? He has taken everything from me. EVERYTHING. My whole life. It’s — it’s — ’

Her eyes narrow. She starts to cry without making a sound. The tears just fall from her eyes. Then they start to glow again and she looks at her husband with contempt. She turns to Henning. It is as if a veil has been placed over her face.

‘Do you know what he made my son do? Do you know who my son is?’

Henning takes another step into the tent.

‘Stefan,’ he says, gently. ‘And it was Stefan who killed Henriette Hagerup.’

She lets out a pitiful howl.

‘H-how do you know that?’ she sobs. He takes a deep breath and prepares himself.

‘I read Henriette Hagerup’s script.’

She sniffs, brushes away the hair from her face. He thinks about what to say, how to find an inroad to the sentient part of her brain. Brute force is no good. Throwing himself at her and dragging her outside is hopeless. Ingvild Foldvik may be reduced to skeleton, but she is a skeleton with a purpose. And, if you have enough of that, you can achieve most things. Besides, she has a stun gun.

‘If you’ll let me, Ingvild,’ he says, as softly as he can, ‘then I want to talk to you about the script.’

‘Ingvild,’ she says, mimicking his voice. ‘So now you think you know all about me, eh? Stupid journalist.’

‘Stefan killed Henriette because your husband slept with her. He might even have been in love with her. He destroyed your family. She destroyed your family and wrote a script which — in parts — dealt with what happened. But Stefan read something more into the script.’

‘What do you mean?’

He glances at Yngve, who is still unconscious.

‘Stefan was into symbolism. The Da Vinci Code Lite, that’s what the newspaper called his script, wasn’t it? Henriette’s hand was chopped off. There was nothing about that in her script. Hudud punishments in sharia law prescribe that thieves are punished by having their hand chopped off. Henriette stole your husband.’

Ingvild digs the spade into the ground. But she stops shovelling more sand and grass around her husband. She clasps her mouth with her other hand.

‘And the flogging. There was nothing about flogging in the script, either. But the film would have ridiculed you and your family. And a woman isn’t allowed to mock, either. The punishment for that is flogging — ’

‘Stop,’ she shouts. It is deadly silent inside the tent. ‘Please stop. I can’t take any more. Please stop.’

The spade keels over and falls to the ground. Ingvild buries her face in her hands. Henning moves further inside the tent, without her noticing. Yngve’s green shirt is soaked with sweat. Ingvild collapses. Henning does nothing, he just watches her cry into her hands. She sits like this for a while, then she dries her tears and looks up at him.

‘You said you reported on my court case,’ she starts in a rusty voice. She clears her throat, she sees him nod.

‘So you know that the bastard raped me and cut me afterwards. I took a course in self-defence, learned all sorts of things, but I never felt safe. Wherever I went, I saw his shadow, felt the knife against my throat, the tip of the knife touching my stomach, touching my — ’

She heaves a sigh.

‘Yngve was understanding. Gave me time, never pressured me. But he got tired of waiting. Waiting for — ’

She closes her eyes and starts to cry again. Henning steps further into the tent. The roof is a couple of metres above his head. It is a large tent, probably big enough for twenty people.

She opens her eyes again. They watch each other for a while, but Henning has an inkling that he is the only one actually seeing. Ingvild’s eyes change from being remote to flashing when she registers colour or movement. Then she disappears into a world of her own again, or some other place where she has no contact with anybody.

‘I got myself one of these,’ she says and takes a mobile out of her pocket. It looks like an ordinary Nokia phone.

‘You can’t get these in Norway.’

She waves the mobile in the air.