Nineteen
Anna awoke to the early arrival of the workmen. When she was dressed and ready for the day she went outside to see what work was already in progress. There were two men and a youth on the site and their van was parked nearby. Both the men were in their fifties. As she approached them, they greeted her. The man on a ladder said his name was Per, and the other man paused in sawing wood to extend a sawdust-covered hand to shake hers. He just said his surname.
‘Larsen.’ Then he introduced the strong-looking youth, who was their apprentice, as Bjorn.
‘Have you found anything of interest up in the rafters, Per?’ she asked casually, as she looked up at him on the ladder, although he was only level with the lower floor.
‘We haven’t been up there yet,’ he replied. ‘There’s a lot of preliminary work to be done before we start to put the roof to rights. But we do find forgotten or lost things from time to time. The best item I have ever found was an old sword – that’s in a museum somewhere now.’ Then he gave a nod down to her. ‘Harry Holmsen will take charge of anything found. No treasure will escape his eye.’
‘I should like to take a look into that top space under the eaves. Could you put a longer ladder up for me?’
He did not query her request, well used to his fellow countrywomen climbing mountains and having a head for heights. He descended his own ladder and then he and Bjorn swung a longer one into place for her. She mounted swiftly in her eagerness, but when she reached a viewpoint she could see only a little way into the aperture, for scorched and fallen turf made a screen that Harry must have pushed through, which was why he had taken his time brushing himself down when he was back on the ground again. Had he gone the whole length of the aperture and rearranged the fallen turf again to keep something hidden in the darkness at the far end?
‘I see you will have a lot of work to do with the roof, Per,’ she said when she had come down again. ‘It is more than I realized.’
‘Yes, but when we have finished here, it will be as if the fire had never been.’
Harry arrived early in the afternoon and went first to discuss some matter with his workmen before he came to give a knock on Anna’s door and enter the house. Anna, who had been expecting him, put aside a letter she was writing to her aunt and looked up.
‘Hi, Anna,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve just been told that you were here. You have two of my best workmen on site now and the stabbur could not be in better hands.’
‘Yes, I’m sure of it.’
‘Any chance of a coffee?’
‘Yes,’ she said, getting up from her chair. Normally, coffee was offered almost as soon as a visitor had arrived, but she had not felt like being hospitable to Harry.
He followed her out into the kitchen where he looked around. ‘You have made it look very nice here. Have you cooked on the old stove yet?’
‘No. I use this primus for heating things up,’ she said, placing the kettle on it. ‘We’re hoping to get electricity laid on any day now. I have an electric cooker and a washing machine on order too.’
‘I’ll see what influence I have with the local electricity board to get you some priority.’
‘No,’ she said firmly, wanting no favours from him. ‘Our order is in and we have been told it will be fulfilled next week. Until then, if we stay the night, we still have to carry hot water upstairs to the bath.’ She knew from the journal that Ingrid had used a tin bath for herself and her children in the kitchen on bath nights. There had been one paragraph in the journal about the enjoyment of sharing it with Magnus and how most of the water had ended up on the kitchen floor.
Harry took the coffee that she handed to him, eyeing her speculatively under lowered lids. ‘You really have taken to this house in spite of a lack of facilities, haven’t you? But I don’t want you to forget that if ever your circumstances change, my offer to buy or rent from you still stands.’
She glanced at him sharply. ‘Are you suggesting that my marriage might not last?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows what can happen in these unsettled times? Alex played the field extensively before he met you.’
She felt too angry to answer him and went back into the living room. Again he sauntered after her, and, with his mug of coffee in his hand, he went to study one of the framed prints of Magnus’s paintings. She sat down at the table where she had been writing and took up her pen in what she hoped would be a hint to him not to stop long.
‘Magnus really could paint,’ he commented admiringly, still regarding the print. ‘It’s a pity the family did not overlook some of his work when this house was cleared. Then you would have had a nice little nest-egg. One of his mountain scenes went for the highest price his work has ever fetched at a recent New York auction.’
Her interest sharpened. Did he think that there still might be a painting or two somewhere in the house? Was that why he had gone secretly into the attic in the hope of finding a painting to take for himself? At an auction, a seller could have his identity withheld and nobody would have been any the wiser. Another question came into her mind. Had he been using the door key to search this house when she and Alex were absent, even though he had had ample opportunity to look everywhere when he repaired the house after the Germans had crashed their way into it? He had read Ingrid’s journal and would know that she had written about a special hiding place that nobody could ever find.
Anna felt anger blaze in her at his deviousness, but she kept it under control. At least she knew now that there was nothing in the aperture or else he would have brought it down with him.
He chatted until he had finished his coffee, not seeming to notice her lack of response since he clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice. ‘I’ll be going now,’ he said finally, putting down his emptied mug on the nearest ledge. ‘Shall you be staying long this time?’
‘I’m not sure. Probably until Alex comes home on Friday evening.’ Then, as Harry reached the door, she added, ‘I believe you have my other key to the house, Harry. May I have it?’
‘Yes!’ he said willingly. ‘I’m glad you reminded me! I have meant to hand it over to you several times, but have forgotten to do it.’
He had already taken it out of his pocket and he placed it within her reach on the table. Then he bade her goodbye and off he went. She wondered if he had had a duplicate key made since he had surrendered it so willingly. Then she let her gaze drift slowly around the room. Had Ingrid hidden a painting or two in that secret hiding place she had mentioned? She had written about the avaricious dealers ready to snatch Magnus’s work off the walls, although that was just her humorous way of describing their greed. And yet? Maybe she had been afraid of having a certain painting stolen from her, one that she liked more than the rest of them. At least it was not the one where Magnus had included her as a blob of orange paint, which Anna treasured.
When Alex came home, Anna told him about Harry’s nocturnal visit. ‘It was so odd! He could go up in that aperture any time during the day, but instead he chose to go there by night with a torch! Yet he can’t have found anything or else I would have seen that he was carrying something when he came down again.’
‘I’ll take a look there myself at the weekend,’ he said. ‘I had no idea there was access to that space under the rafters.’
‘It is likely that we should never have known about it if it had not been for the damage to the roof in the fire.’
‘The stabbur could have burned like a torch if nobody had spotted the fire in time. Then, if there is something of value up there, it would have been lost forever.’
The following Sunday morning, with the workmen absent, Alex went up the ladder and climbed through into the aperture. Anna, standing below, watched his long legs disappear. After about ten minutes he reappeared.
‘I need some tools. There is a false wall partitioning off the far end and I’m going to knock through it.’
He went into the house and found what he wanted from tools he had brought there when putting up shelves and doing other small chores. This time he was so long in the aperture that Anna guessed the partition must be very solid, for there was a great deal of banging before finally there was silence. She waited impatiently and then anxiously for him to reappear. When he did, his expression told her that something was seriously wrong. He was looking shocked and saddened.
‘What is it?’ she cried as he descended. ‘What did you find?’
He dropped his tools on to the ground and took hold of her by the shoulders. ‘I found an old wedding chest up there.’
She gasped. ‘That was Ingrid’s secret hiding place! She said nobody would ever find it!’
He shook his head. ‘This is nothing to do with Ingrid or anything she ever thought of hiding there. Its contents are far more recent and must have been there for the past six or seven years.’
‘Dating back to the occupation?’ she whispered in mounting horror, for he looked so grave.
‘I believe I have found the remains of the resistance fighter whose death has remained a mystery ever since he disappeared. I must get to the nearest phone and call the police.’
She thought of the following few hours as a nightmare when she looked back afterwards on that hideous time. A police car arrived very quickly and the two young policemen who sprang out looked stern and important, neither having come in contact with such a serious crime before. One hastened up the ladder to investigate. Soon afterwards he emerged to give a grim nod to confirm what he had found. He made immediate contact with the police station at Molde, while his companion began to cordon off the stabbur. Then senior officers came by launch across the fjord, and both Alex and Anna made clear and precise statements to them. They were informed that two detectives were already flying up from Oslo and would question them again. In the meantime, the house had to be vacated as it was located in the crime scene and was about to be cordoned off too.
Anna, intensely protective of Ingrid’s house, left it reluctantly. Later she heard that there had been great difficulty in getting the heavy chest brought down from the aperture, and Anna thought how light-heartedly Ingrid had thought of it as a perfect hiding place for treasures, never suspecting that one day long after her time it would be used to conceal a grisly murder.
Several weeks of investigation passed before Harry was arrested and charged. His nocturnal visit had been to check that the chest was still well hidden behind the stout partition he had built himself at the time of committing the crime. He had also needed to know that there was no danger of the hiding place being revealed during repairs from the fire damage. It was not Anna’s evidence of witnessing his nocturnal coming and going that settled Harry’s guilt, but the discovery amid the skeletal remains and rotted clothing of a gold ring that had slipped from his finger as he had struggled to lift the body into the chest in such cramped quarters. Steffan identified it as the one that had belonged to Magnus and which he had given to Harry.
Alex and Anna both went to the funeral of the resistance fighter, which was held at the little church of his country birthplace, and he was laid to rest in its churchyard. The service was attended by many people, including the Crown Prince, who came to pay his personal respects to a man of great courage.
It had all come out at Harry’s trial that throughout the occupation his loyalty had been to Hitler and the Nazi regime, his own advancement being his prime concern. The meagre help he had given secretly to his fellow countrymen had been to ensure that the resistance did not suspect his duplicity, especially when it was beginning to look as if the Allies might win the war after all. He had convinced the local Nazi commander that he had shot and buried in the forest the resistance fighter they had been hunting, but in reality he had not dared to risk firing a gun where people in the area might come to investigate. He had stabbed his victim in a confrontation, and the hiding place in the stabbur had seemed ideal for concealment, since it was too risky to start digging a grave when he could be sighted by a local person in the mountains at any time. The old chest in the stabbur near at hand, which he believed destined never to be found again, seemed the perfect solution.
At his trial he also admitted setting fire to the stabbur in the intention of finally destroying forever all trace of his crime. He had not expected one bonfire too many to be noticed that night, when almost everybody was celebrating Midsummer Eve. Now, many such nights would pass and he would be a great deal older before he ever saw these celebrations again.
When the restoration work on the stabbur was finished and the aperture blocked up forever, the doors were painted the same mellow tawny colour that must have been Ingrid’s choice in days gone by, and which was in harmony with the surroundings of fir and pine, particularly in autumn when many trees took on blazing colours and even the cranberry leaves turned crimson. It was a fresh beginning for the stabbur and it became both a library and guest quarters, with a few comfortable and traditional pieces of furniture, as well as some very fine hand-woven wall hangings, which, with the bright rag-rugs, had been bought at a handicraft shop.
A year later Anna gave birth to a son, whom they named David. Steffan delighted in the child, but not long after David’s first birthday Steffan died quietly in his sleep. He had bequeathed the house to Gudrun for her lifetime and an income that would keep her in comfort till the end of her days. But, after Steffan’s demise, her health deteriorated and she moved into a home for elderly people. She lived long enough to see Anna’s daughter, who was born two years after little David and was named Julie. Although Anna, as well as Steffan’s grandchildren, received generous bequests, a large portion of Steffan’s fortune went to secure the future of a school for orphaned children in Africa that he had supported for many years. The four paintings that had hung in the hall of his home were bequeathed to a Bergen art gallery.
Anna felt the time had come now to decide where Ingrid’s original journal should be hidden away again, but as yet she had not decided where that should be.