Black Seconds by Karin Fossum Read Free Book Online Page A

and bundled into a car?
    Adorable and precocious, he thought. It was a bad combination. It made her a target. Staring into those brown eyes it was impossible not to melt. He tried to connect these three things. Warm feelings for an enchanting child, followed by physical arousal, and finally destruction. He understood the first one. He even managed to imagine fleeting moments of desire. The purity, the fragility that children embodied. So smooth, uncorrupted and tender; they smelled so good, they trembled and quivered. And purely by being an adult, you had the strength to take what you wanted. But to beat and squeeze the life out of a tiny child was beyond comprehension. The frenzied struggle as life slowly ebbed away in your hands was unimaginable. He rubbed his tired eyes, repelled by his thought experiment. He decided to ring Sara’s hotel in New York. She was not in.
    It was late in the evening. The town lay
    smouldering like a dying fire between blue-black ridges. He could go home and pour himself a glass of whisky. He would probably be able to fall asleep quite easily. The fact that he could lie down and 50
    sleep while Ida was lost in the darkness, while Helga waited for her with stinging eyes, disturbed him deeply. He would rather be outside. Walk the streets with all his senses alert. Be outside because Ida was. The search parties still had nothing to report. He was startled by a knock on the door. Jacob Skarre popped his head round.
    ‘You still here?’ Sejer asked. ‘What are you doing at this hour?’
    ‘Same as you, I suppose. Hanging around.’
    Skarre took a look around his boss’s office. Beneath Sejer’s desk lamp was a salt-dough figure. It was meant to be a police officer wearing a blue uniform and had been made by Sejer’s grandchild. Skarre lifted up the figure and inspected it.
    ‘It’s starting to go mouldy,’ he said. ‘Did you know?’
    Sejer pretended not to hear him. It would never even cross his mind to throw the figure away. True, it did look a little worse for wear, but it certainly did not smell.
    ‘Can I smoke out of the window?’ Skarre asked. He waited patiently for a reply, holding a Prince cigarette in his hand. He got a brief affirmative nod from Sejer and sat down on the windowsill. He struggled with the heavy window for a few moments.
    ‘Like she’s vanished into thin air,’ he stated, blowing smoke out into the September night. ‘They haven’t found so much as a hair slide.’
    ‘She had nothing to lose,’ Sejer said. ‘No wrist watch, no jewellery. But I’m pleased about one thing.’
    51
    ‘Really?’ Skarre said glumly.
    ‘We haven’t found any bloodstained clothing. Or a child’s shoe abandoned on the road, or a bicycle dumped in a ditch. I like the fact that we haven’t found anything.’
    ‘Why?’ Skarre said, surprised.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Sejer admitted.
    ‘That only goes to show that he is thorough,’
    Skarre said. ‘It doesn’t make me feel better at all.’
    He inhaled the cigarette smoke deeply. ‘Waiting like this is pure torture.’
    ‘It certainly is for Anders and Helga Joner,’ Sejer said drily.
    Skarre fell silent. Was it a rebuke? He kept blowing smoke out of the open window, but some of it still drifted back into the darkened office. Finally he held the glowing cigarette butt under the tap in the sink.
    ‘Time to call it a day?’
    Sejer nodded and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair.
    ‘What did you think about the press coverage?’
    Skarre asked him later. They were standing in the car park outside the police station. Both of them jingling their car keys.
    ‘Journalists are all right,’ Sejer said. ‘When you read what they’ve actually written. What I really object to is the way some editors lay everything out. They use photos and drawings to speculate and insinuate.’
    Skarre remembered the pictures from the day’s papers. The photos of Ida, the type of bicycle she had, 52
    a yellow Nakamura, the type of