The Widow

by Helene Flood

Genres: Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

"A wonderful storyteller" Chris Whitaker

The big dark house at the top of the hill never felt like Evy's.

Erling's parents insisted it be held in his name only, that their old furniture should remain in place after they were gone.

And now Erling's gone too. Her husband and her rock. A heart attack while riding his bike. No trace of his medications were found in his body, as if someone had tampered with them.

Right now, Evy can't be sure of anything. Her memory's patchy, her focus blurred. Her grown-up children whisper about her like she can't be trusted to look after herself.

How can she tell them she doesn't feel safe in the house? Doors left open she closed herself. Erling's possessions no longer where he left them.


Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not next.

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"Creepy, compelling and very well written" Harriet Tyce

"Wonderfully creepy, twisty and compelling" Karen Hamilton

Praise for The Lover

"Taut, clever and irresistible" Anna Bailey

"An absolutely prime slice of Scandicrime" Financial Times

Translated from the Nowegian by Alison McCullough

Release date: October 10, 2024

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

There’s an echoing in my ears, even though there is only silence. As if someone has just turned off a loudspeaker that had been playing at full blast for several hours and the sound still lingers. I sit on the sofa, straining to hear. My hands are shaking. I could do with something to calm my nerves, but I resist. I sit here and listen to the only audible sound in the house: the ticking of the grandfather clock.

The intention is that I’m not left alone. I haven’t been told this in these exact words, or at least I don’t think so, but I must admit that these days I have a tendency to zone out of conversations. The doctor who spoke to us at the hospital That Day asked if she could have a word with me, and I remember precious little of what she said. She was around fifty, perhaps, and she had these lines on either side of her mouth, indentations in the skin that decades upon decades of smiles and laughter and screaming and shouting had rendered permanent. I considered them, and wondered when the ones on my own face had arisen. Was I older or younger than her at the time? I never noticed their arrival. Once they had appeared, it was as if they had always been there. This is what I was thinking about as the doctor spoke to me. She had set aside time in her busy day for our conversation. One has to assume that what she said was important.

It was my children who decided that I can’t be left alone. I overheard my daughters talking about it. One of these past few days – yesterday, or maybe the day before that. They were in Erling’s study, and I was listening from out in the hallway. It was Hanne who spoke, in her insistent voice. Hanne always does most of the talking.

“That’s going to be a hell of a job,” she said. “Pappa must have five boxes full of them.”

Silje didn’t answer. Or maybe I simply didn’t hear her reply. Regardless, Hanne went on and on about all Erling’s things. She felt responsible for them, is what I gathered. She wanted to ensure they were taken care of, or sorted out – even thrown away. This was news to me. Erling’s possessions are scattered through every room, and why shouldn’t they be? It’s our house.

And now it was vital they keep a close eye on me, Hanne said. Silje made an approving sound, and Hanne went on: it must be so hard, Mamma shouldn’t be left alone. Huh, I thought – shouldn’t I? I’ve always liked being alone.

The door was half open, and I peered into the room. They were standing at the desk, sorting through some papers. Erling’s appointment book lay open, presumably full of appointments that would never amount to anything now. My daughters had their backs to the hallway where I stood, and neither of them saw me.

Today it’s Bård’s turn to visit me. He called a little while ago to tell me he was on his way. He said he just had to drop in on a client first, I can’t remember where – was it Drammen? Tønsberg, perhaps? I had another one of those moments, where I simply dropped out of the conversation. It’s happened several times over the past few days. Is it a consequence of what’s happened, a side effect of the shock? I’ve been spared major losses until now, though I lost my father many years ago. And you hear things, of course. About other people, their losses. Has anyone ever mentioned it? This inability to keep the thread of a conversation. The way the attention simply slips away and attaches itself to whatever the eyes happen to fall upon, the first thing they see. As if the mind is no longer able to prioritise effectively.

Outside, the terrace lies bare. If I close my eyes, I see flashes from That Day: Maria Berger as she comes running up Nordheimbakken, calling out to me. The plastic clip that fastens the strap of the bicycle helmet under Erling’s chin, the white strip of eyeball just visible beneath his upper eyelids. The hand with his wedding ring on one finger, as familiar to me as my own, lying there on the tarmac. The surprisingly uncomfortable chairs in the hospital waiting room, the clicking of Hanne’s heels along the corridor as she came running. The lines around the doctor’s mouth. The song that was playing on the radio when Bård drove me home afterwards, oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world. Letting myself into this house, alone. The fact that I didn’t take a sleeping pill, because what if Erling came home after all – I’d need to be able to wake up, to go and unlock the door for him. Of course, I knew he wasn’t coming – I hadn’t completely lost my mind. He’s no longer here, and the knowledge rattles my body, crackles all the way down to my fingertips: Erling is dead.

Of course I know this. I knew it then, too. But I lay there all the same, alone in the bed, and thought: If he comes home, I want to be able to hear him.

I catch sight of the tip of the grey paper wrapping of the bouquet of flowers that’s leaning against the dining-room wall. When did I put it there? Could it have been just before I sat down? I’m not sure, I’m uncertain as to how long I’ve been sitting here. The bouquet was left propped against the front door when I got home from the supermarket earlier today. I haven’t done anything with it. I haven’t even opened it to see who it’s from. For a long while I just sat at the dining table, staring at it.

There’s something peculiar about all the demands made of the recipient, I thought as I stared – all these tasks that accompany a bouquet of flowers. First, it has to be unwrapped. The paper has to be thrown away and the stalks cut; a vase has to be dug from the depths of a kitchen cabinet and filled with water and plant food. Then the flowers need constant attention: the water has to be changed, any dead ones need to be taken out and those remaining rearranged. Eventually they all die, of course, and then the whole lot have to be thrown away, the vase washed and dried, the rubbish taken out. What an idea: your husband died, so here you go – now you have twenty individual plants, lopped off at the root and therefore at death’s door, and now it’s your job to take care of them, to do what you can to delay the inevitable, before you finally have to accept your own inadequacy as they wilt and die. On the other hand, it’s just a custom, so perhaps it’s sensible not to think too much about it. Erling was very concerned with common sense. She’s a sensible woman, he might say about someone, or he acted very sensibly. This was the greatest compliment he could bestow. The opposite was his ultimate condemnation.

The grandfather clock strikes the hour. Then the ticking resumes, tick, tock, the very pulse of the house. I sit on the sofa and consider the still-wrapped flowers. A sensible woman would unwrap them. In my mind I leave the bouquet leaning against the living-room wall, get up and turn and saunter upstairs, into the bathroom, and open our little medicine cabinet. Find the box with its brand name, its label with my name printed on it in neat, black letters: EVY KROGH. FOR THE TREATMENT OF SLEEPLESSNESS AND ANXIETY. How long can it be since I last took one?

But what I’m feeling isn’t really anxiety. I don’t know what it is. I just wish I could be spared having to deal with all this.

Earlier today, a young man from the environmental non-profit came to the door. He offered his condolences, and he had brought me a plant. Jesus, it’s just tragic, he said, then he moderated his words: or, I mean, it’s terribly sad. Afterwards, I thought about this downgrading. Erling is sixty-eight. Was. Probably a good deal older than this boy’s parents. I didn’t say anything. At least he brought a pot plant rather than cut flowers.

Synne came yesterday. Olav came over the day after it happened, as did Erling’s sister, who made a brief trip from Bergen. I sit here, trying to keep count, to keep track of them all. Erling and I live a fairly quiet life. We don’t have many visitors. Generally it’s just the two of us here, but over the past few days there’s been a non-stop barrage.

A harsh noise cuts through the room. The doorbell is like an air raid siren – it slashes through the silence, demanding action. It’s been this way ever since we took over the house from Erling’s parents. It was probably my father-in-law who installed it, it would have been just like him. There’s nothing inviting about it, it orders you to stand to attention, and on each and every day of the thirty-odd years I’ve lived in this house, I’ve hated its strictness. Now, though, I find it reassuring. On your feet, it says, and my legs, which I don’t otherwise seem to be entirely able to control, obey.

“Mamma?” Bård calls.

I’m clearly not moving fast enough for him, and he’s let himself in. He hasn’t taken off his shoes. He was like that as a child, too – always forgetting himself and stomping in with his boots on. When I notice this, my heart gives a little squeeze.

Now he’s taller than me. And not really young anymore, either. He hugs me, and I see that his hair is thinning at the back of his head, that his pale brown curls are in the process of disappearing. His hair is the same colour mine was when I was younger, the same as Hanne’s, too, but his curls are beginning to grey. Hanne has retained her colour – presumably with a little help from regular trips to the hairdresser, which cost a fortune. Bård smells of his car and of coffee, and he’s wearing a pale blue shirt with fine stitching. I release him, look at him. The skin around his eyes is grey and twitchy.

“How are you?” he asks, and I refrain from mentioning his shoes.

“Oh, you know,” I say. “And you?”

He wipes a hand across his forehead, as if to wipe away the exhaustion. Gives a weak smile.

“Oh, you know.”

Bård is my firstborn. He came into the world the year I turned thirty-three, all red-faced and thrashing. He was a sensitive child. Timid, good-humoured, for the most part, but when provoked he could fly into a rage. You shouldn’t rank your children, and I love all mine equally – I do. But I’m closest to Bård. I can read him more easily than I can the girls. I have a special fondness for him, too. Now we’re eating in silence, and I realise that I’ve forgotten to get out the placemats. The old mahogany dining table belonged to Erling’s parents – it scratches if you so much as look at it. And now I’ve just put the greasy tub of chicken stir-fry Bård brought straight onto the bare wood.

Bård stares into space, glassy-eyed – he’s far away. Is he thinking about his father? Is the sudden loss causing him pain? But no, it isn’t that. Or at least, not only that. Part of him is still at work, I think, contemplating his last meeting.

He looks up and sees that I’m watching him. He smiles. He’s handsome, too, my boy. Grew up to be tall and slim, with fine, symmetrical features. “So what have you been up to today, Mamma?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I’ve just been sitting here.”

This surprises him. He probably can’t remember when he last had a day free of demands on his time. He and his wife live in an old house they’re currently renovating, and they have two boys who participate in all kinds of sports. Every single weekend the family attends a rally or a match or a race; they sell waffles to raise money, they wax skis and cheer on the team. And when they’re not doing that, they’re painting skirting boards or working in the garden.

“All day?”

“What else was I supposed to do?” I ask.

He looks taken aback. Then a small smile breaks across his lips.

“Pfft, who knows.”

As he reaches for the tub of takeaway, lifting it to reveal the puddle of oil on the tabletop’s mirror-like surface, he asks about the package wrapped in grey paper lying on the floor next to the sideboard.

“Some flowers were delivered to the door,” I say. “I didn’t have a chance to unwrap them.”

“You didn’t have a chance?”

He frowns, and his smile disappears.

“I’ll do it,” he says.

The scissors are in the study. The huge desk belonged to Erling’s father – Professor of Law and Supreme Court Justice Krogh. It’s made of solid, dark oak, with elaborately carved ornamentations that collect dust it’s almost impossible to get rid of. I’ve never liked it. We inherited a great deal of furniture when we took over the house, this brown-stained detached property atop a rocky knoll in Montebello. It was part of the deal. All Erling’s books are arranged on the shelves that line the walls. The desktop lies open and empty, ready for work.

But something in here is different. Isn’t it? I can’t quite put my finger on what. The smooth desktop, the high-backed chair tucked under it. I grab the scissors from the desk tidy. In the doorway I turn and look about me. Yes – something in here isn’t right.

But perhaps this is only natural. He’s missing, of course, and maybe it’s just that.

“Here,” Bård says once he’s managed to tear the first layer of paper off the bouquet. He hands me the card.

The envelope is bright white, pristine, unsullied; the note inside written on creamy, textured paper. Dear Evy, it says. I’m so sorry for your loss. Erling was a dear friend to me, as are you. With best wishes, Edvard Weimer.

Beneath the grey paper there’s a layer of plastic. Bård sighs – all this packaging. I say nothing. Read the card again. A dear friend.

“Is it really necessary to wrap so much rubbish around a single bunch of flowers?” Bård mumbles. “Dad would have hit the roof.”

As are you.

Wrapped in the plastic is a bouquet of twenty long-stalked white roses. Mother used to sing a ditty that explained the meaning of various colours of rose. Red is for a lover, yellow for a friend. White is for . . . I don’t remember. It’s decades since I last spoke to Edvard Weimer, but something tells me he’s a man who knows these kinds of things.

“Who are they from?” Bård asks.

“Someone called Edvard,” I say. “He’s an old friend of Pappa’s.”

Bård glances at the card and frowns.

“Never heard of him.”

Once again, I refrain from taking a sleeping pill, so I lie awake, tossing and turning in bed. At around two in the morning I get up and go downstairs.

The hallway is dark, but for the faint light from outside, which streams into Erling’s study through the window and seeps out here through the open door. I stand in shadow. My feet bare, I walk over to the doorway and peer into the room.

Something is wrong in here. Something has been moved. Something that should be here is missing.

But so what? Objects get moved – that kind of thing happens all the time. The night muddles one’s thoughts. The darkness and silence give the surroundings alternate meanings. Make little things into warnings, trifles into sombre premonitions. I should go back upstairs, get back into bed, snatch a few hours’ sleep.

But I stand there all the same. Counting the seconds, looking about me.

They are standing on the front step when I open the door – a man and a woman. The man is tall and sinewy, with a bushy moustache. I’ve never liked beards or moustaches – I get that from Mother, who found facial hair unseemly. The woman next to him is wearing a leather jacket, her reddish-brown hair gathered into a ponytail. The lanky moustachioed man is wearing jeans and a windcheater. He appears to be the one who rang the bell.

“Krogh?” he asks. “Evy Krogh?”

“Yes?”

“Gundersen here, with the police. This is my colleague, Ingvild Fredly. I’m very sorry to hear of your husband’s recent passing.”

I nod, not entirely sure how I’m supposed to respond.

“We have a few questions in connection with that,” he says. “May we come in?”

The man who calls himself Gundersen dominates my living room. Erling was tall, too, but his shoulders became increasingly stooped as the years passed. Gundersen’s back and shoulders are immodestly erect, his body leaning forward slightly, as if he can’t wait to make a start on what’s coming. He’s quick, is the impression I get. Already several steps ahead of the rest of us.

“Is it okay if I take a look around?” Ingvild Fredly asks.

I only look at her. Is it okay? I don’t want her snooping through our things, I really don’t, but you don’t say no to the police. At least, not if you’re from a decent home and grew up with law-abiding parents who did their duty, paid their taxes and never got so much as a speeding ticket.

“Of course,” I say.

She has strong features – large eyebrows, a heavyset jaw. But her eyes are kind.

I show her into the hallway. Open the heavy double doors that have always been here. They were my mother-in-law’s idea, I imagine. When closed – as they always are – they separate the more public parts of the house from the private: the upstairs with its bedrooms; the study and the cellar door. Before we moved in, I had thought this an old-fashioned arrangement, but somehow, we ended up living the same way.

Whenever we have guests – even if it’s our own children – we close the double doors. What lies beyond them is for Erling and me alone. But in just a matter of days everything has been turned on its head – my daughters now walk through the double doors and into the study, thinking nothing of it. I let Fredly through, too. Perhaps it’s outdated to believe that certain things are private and must be hidden, I think, as I watch the policewoman stride towards the stairs.

When I return, Gundersen is standing there looking about him.

“Is there somewhere we might take a seat?” he asks.

He settles his weight over his heels now, observing. It might look as if he’s simply taking his time over things, but I watch his gaze – it hops from one place to the next at lightning speed, taking everything in.

We sit in the living room. I take the sofa, and he chooses the armchair. He rests his elbows on his knees, leans forward.

“So,” he says. “I suppose you must be wondering why we’re here?”

I nod.

“As you’ll be aware, a post-mortem was just performed on your husband.”

Was it? The doctor with the laugh lines. The things she said, and which I didn’t pay attention to. My hands tremble slightly against my thighs, and I gather them in my lap, hiding them. The policeman must notice my hesitation, because he flicks through some papers, says something about information I should have received at the hospital.

“It was, you know . . . That Day,” I say. “There are things I don’t quite remember.”

“That’s perfectly understandable.”

There’s compassion in his eyes – but not too much, and I like that. Now I see that, like Fredly, he too has kind eyes.

“The thing is,” he says, “certain irregularities were discovered. So we thought it worth looking into them.”

He leafs through the papers again.

“Erling’s medical records state that he was taking certain medications. For his heart, things of that nature. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I say. “Daily.”

Gundersen rattles them off: Digoxin, Metoprolol, Simvastatin and so on and so forth, prescribed by the doctor after Erling’s heart problems were diagnosed some years ago. I nod obediently. I recognise the names from the boxes and the bottle in the bathroom cabinet, but I don’t remember what was prescribed when or for what purpose.

“One thing that surprised the pathologist,” Gundersen says, “is that no traces of these medications were found in Erling’s body.”

It feels as if I only partly hear him. This feeling again, as if I’ve been listening to deafening music for hours and someone has only just turned it off.

“That is, it appears he hadn’t been taking his pills,” the policeman says. “Not for weeks.”

“That’s strange.”

“He never said anything about stopping taking them? That he was worried about potential side effects, or that he’d started exercising instead? Eating more healthily, consulting a homeopath, those kinds of things?”

I snigger. The sound is inappropriate, and it surprises both him and me.

“You didn’t know Erling,” I say. “If the doctor told him to do something, he did it. Had she asked him to run a marathon by next summer, he’d have started training. And he despised alternative medicine.”

Gundersen smiles.

“I know the type,” he says. “Which makes it even more strange. Do you know where he kept his medicines?”

“Of course. In the medicine cabinet, in the bathroom upstairs.”

I imagine Fredly’s hands in the cabinet. And my own box of pills: for the treatment of sleeplessness and anxiety.

“Good,” he says, but he makes no move to get up. Instead, he leans on his forearms, which rest on his thighs, and looks at me.

“So how do you make sense of this, Evy? Erling follows his doctor’s orders to the letter, his doctor has prescribed him medications for his heart and to lower his cholesterol, and yet we found no trace of these in his body.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know how to make sense of it.”

I hear my voice as an echo. I’m so lethargic, so listless, despite not having taken a pill yesterday. It’s as if I’m watching us from a distance. As if none of this really concerns me. As if it’s all a dream. Erling is dead, and now a policeman is sitting in our living room.

“Gundersen,” the policewoman shouts from upstairs.

“Excuse me for just a moment,” he says, and gets up.

The grandfather clock ticks its way through the viscous seconds until he comes back. I count two hundred and seventy-nine of them.

“There are no medicines in the bathroom cabinet,” he says when he returns.

“That’s where he keeps them,” I say. “In the cabinet on the wall beside the mirror.”

“We’ve searched the shelves,” Gundersen says. “There are ordinary painkillers, two boxes of pills with your name on them, and a bottle of cod liver oil capsules. Nothing belonging to Erling.”

And I’m still far away, as if I’m watching us through the wrong end of a telescope. I feel an uneasy gnawing at the back of my mind: haven’t I seen the boxes of pills there, only recently?

It must be around three years since he was given the first prescription. He’d started complaining that he was getting out of breath, so I told him to go to the doctor. Pfft, he said – was that really necessary? Weeks passed. I complained to Hanne. Hanne called the GP and booked an appointment, then called Erling and said: you have an appointment on Wednesday, could you please make sure you go?

The doctor had a listen, did some tests, and was concerned. Erling was referred for further tests at the hospital, then sent home with some prescriptions. The pharmacy gave him two boxes containing blister packs, along with a glass bottle. In the living room, he spread them across the coffee table’s worn surface.

“My daily dose,” he said, looking a little pale. “From now on, I’ll be on medication for life.”

We looked at them, the boxes and the bottle. Erling glanced up at me, his mouth twisted into the lopsided smile he sometimes wore.

“No-one can live forever, Evy.”

I blinked a couple of times, feeling strangely moved. And so it begins, I thought – old age. I think I’d had a glass of wine with lunch that day, so I have to ask myself: were thos. . .