Scarred by Thomas Enger Read Free Book Online

her mobile, which vibrates and beeps every two seconds. She feels like kicking a hole in the seat in front of her. Her mood worsens when she realises that her tights have laddered below the knee. Trine in a hole will probably be the headline in some newspaper soon. And how they’ll laugh at the editorial offices. Fortunately she is not due in Parliament until later today and she knows they sell tights in the Parliament shop.
    Trine usually spends her time in the car catching up on the news, but not today. She dreads the moment when the car stops and she will have to get out and face the vultures. She spots the media the moment the car pulls up in front of H Block in the government district.
    Trine tries to focus on the sound of her own footsteps as she walks the short distance to the entrance. Click, click, quick and hard. Words and predictable questions rise and fall before rising again because she doesn’t answer. The sound waves follow her even after the security guard has admitted her. As she enters the lift and the doors close behind her, the noise instantly disappears. It is like wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Suddenly she can hear her own hectic breathing.
    Trine closes her eyes as the lift sweeps her upwards. She doesn’t open them again until it pings and the doors slide open.
    *
    As soon as she steps out into the corridor, she feels the probing looks of people coming in the opposite direction. Normally she would have met them with her head held high and a friendly nod. But not today. She is burning up inside and her rage expresses itself as angry lines around her eyes. Your feet , she thinks. Concentrate on your feet .
    At the door to the wing where Trine and the administration of the Justice Department have their offices, she is met by Katarina Hatlem, her Director of Communications. She ushers Trine in while she continues to talk on her phone.
    ‘I understand,’ she says. ‘But Trine isn’t here yet. We’ll have to get back to you—’
    Hatlem rolls her eyes.
    ‘Fine,’ she says eventually. ‘The people’s demand has been duly noted. I’m going into a meeting now. Goodbye.’
    Then she hangs up and shakes her head so her long red curls bounce from side to side.
    Over time Katarina Hatlem has become one of Trine’s closest friends. Trine can talk to her about anything, but the main reason she wanted Katarina as her Director of Communications was that she had worked for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK, for many years. She knows the media inside out.
    Trine rushes down the corridor leading to her office, but slows down when she reaches the portrait wall where former Justice Secretaries smile at her from gilded frames. It is a world dominated by men, but with a stronger female presence in the last two or three decades. The pictures act as a reminder of how quickly a life in politics can change. Many of the Ministers resigned under a cloud, Trine remembers, and some of them fell hard. She knows that her department has already prepared a framed picture of her in case her departure turns out to be sudden. They have even bought her leaving present. It is like working under the sword of Damocles.
    She speeds up, enters her office and hangs her jacket on a coat stand behind her desk.
    ‘Is everyone in yet?’ she says brusquely.
    ‘Everyone who needs to be here, yes,’ Hatlem says.
    ‘Okay, let’s start the meeting.’
    Hatlem leaves the moment Harald Ullevik enters. He stops and says ‘hi’ to Trine with a warm gaze that, like the sound of his voice earlier, makes her throat feel tight and raw. She forces herself to look at something other than the elegant man in front of her. With his short, greying hair and his perfect posture Harald Ullevik could easily feature in a Dressmann ad. At a party once Katarina Hatlem compared him to Harrison Ford and the forty-six-year-old Junior Minister is probably the man in this building who attracts the most attention – also from other