The Wrong Key

She went up on the Sunday with the key in an evidence bag in her breast pocket, because she had decided somewhere around three in the morning that there was one question she had not asked, and that she had not asked it because it was too stupid to ask, and that this was not a good enough reason.

The weather was clear and hard and blue, one of the four or five days a winter that make people move to the valley and then regret it in November. The snowmobile went up the summer track without argument. She could see the hut from the moment she cleared the trees and she watched it the whole way, the way you watch a thing you have started to think of as a witness.

She stood on the step for a minute first. There was a hasp and a staple and a brass padlock on it, the kind you buy anywhere, not new, greened a little at the shackle. She took photographs of it from four angles and then a fifth with her own hand in shot for scale, and she did all of this slowly and carefully, and she was aware that she was putting off finding out.

Then she took the key out of the bag with her glove off and put it in the padlock. It went in. It went in about two thirds and stopped, and it did not turn, and she took it out and looked at it and put it in again and it stopped in exactly the same place.

Ida stood on the step of the Fjellstad hut at nine hundred metres in bright sunshine with her bare hand going numb and a dead man's key in a lock it did not fit, and she was, for perhaps four seconds, completely certain that she had made some obvious error that she would be ashamed of later.

She tried it the other way up. She tried it with the shackle pulled and with it pushed. She warmed it in her fist and tried it again in case of ice in the barrel and it stopped in the same place. Then she put it away, and sealed the bag, and signed the seal, and wrote the time, and found that her writing had gone bad and that she did not care.

She walked the two hundred metres down to where he had been and stood in the scoop of wind-crust with the hut behind her and looked back up at it, and she thought about him doing this. Getting to the door. The key going in two thirds of the way. Trying it the other way up. Warming it in his fist. And then turning round.

The padlock was not new but it was newer than the hasp, and the hasp had two sets of screw holes in it, an old set filled with dirt and a fresh set with bright metal still in the slots. Somebody had taken one lock off and put another on and had not bothered to line up the fixings, because why would you, on a hut, in October.

She got the hut open with the co-op's own key from the board, which she had signed out on the Saturday from a girl at the office who had handed it over without the smallest interest. Inside there were four bunks, a table, a stove that had come out of Lidhaugen and been fitted well, and a woodstack under the bench that was, exactly as Erling had said, full.

There was a visitors' book on a string. The last entry was from October and was in Erling Brenna's own hand: New stove in. New lock on. Old keys to be handed in at the co-op. And under it, a list of six names with ticks against five of them.

Ida read that four times. Then she photographed the page, and then the whole book, and then she sat down on a bunk in a cold hut with her breath going up in front of her and read the sentence again. Old keys to be handed in at the co-op. Five ticks against six names.

The unticked name was Sverre Lid. Which meant nothing on its own, because Sverre Lid was eighty-four and had probably lost the key in 1997 and told everybody so, loudly, and been forgiven, and the tick had simply never gone in.

But it also meant that somebody in this valley had known, in October, in writing, on a string, in a hut, that there was an old key still out. And that the same somebody had written the sentence and drawn the ticks and left the sixth line blank, and had therefore looked at that blank line every time he opened the book, which for the man who ran the huts would be every time he came up.

She lit the stove, because the hut was there and the wood was there and she had another hour of paperwork in her, and because she wanted to be able to say, if anybody ever asked, that she had been warm two hundred metres from where Halvard Nesse had not been. It took nine minutes to get comfortable. That was the number she wrote down. Nine minutes.

The cooperative kept its papers in a filing cabinet in the room behind the office and had no procedure at all for anybody asking to see them, so Ida asked, and the girl said she supposed so, and that was the whole of it. She sat at a folding table with the November minutes and a coffee going cold and read every word of eleven pages about grazing rights.

Item seven. Fjellstad hut: chair reported works completed. New lock fitted 14 Oct. Chair confirmed old keys recovered and destroyed with the exception of one issued to S. Lid, deceased members' keys being unrecoverable in practice. Meeting agreed no further action.

Deceased. Sverre Lid was not deceased. Sverre Lid had been in the shop on Wednesday telling her that a dog was worse. She read it again and found the trap in it: the sentence did not say Lid was dead. It said deceased members' keys, generally, were unrecoverable, and put Lid's name next to it in a way that let a reader join the two.

Whoever wrote that had written it very carefully, or had written it in a hurry and by pure chance produced the one sentence that would let a key stay out in the world without anybody at the November meeting thinking about it for longer than four seconds. Ida had been a police officer for eleven years and had learned that both of those happen, and that they look identical on paper.

The chair of the cooperative was Erling Brenna. The minutes were in the secretary's hand and signed by the chair at the foot of the last page. She photographed all eleven pages and then asked the girl who typed the minutes and the girl said the secretary did, from the chair's notes, and that the chair always brought his notes typed anyway because he did not trust anybody's handwriting.

"Are the notes kept?" "They will be in the folder." They were in the folder. And item seven in the notes and item seven in the minutes were the same sentence to the word, including deceased, and Ida sat back on the folding chair and looked at the ceiling of a back office in a valley with the pass shut, and let herself feel it for about ten seconds before she put it away.

Because it was still nothing. It was a badly worded minute. It was a key that had not been collected from an old man. A prosecutor would look at it once. And the twenty-eighth was in five days, and after the twenty-eighth it would be a folder on a desk in Bergen with a pathology report on top of it saying, correctly, that the man had frozen to death.

She went back to the Brenna house on the Monday knowing that it was the wrong thing to do and doing it anyway, and Marit opened the door before she knocked, which meant she had been watched all the way up the track, which she had expected.

"He is at the co-op." "I know. I came for you." Marit stood in the doorway for a moment and then stepped back, and Ida went into the kitchen, and Marit did not go to the sink this time, which was somehow worse. She sat down at her own table and put her hands flat on it and waited.

"Mrs Brenna, when your husband came in on the Monday night, was he wet?" It was not the question either of them had been expecting and Ida had not known she was going to ask it until it was out. Marit looked at her hands. The clock in the hall did what clocks in halls do.

"He came in at half past eleven," said Marit, "and he put his coat on the rail over the stove, and it steamed. It steamed for an hour. I sat here and watched it steam." She said it in the flat, careful voice of somebody who has rehearsed a sentence for a fortnight without ever deciding whether she would say it.

"Did you ask him where he had been?" "No." "Why not?" And Marit Brenna looked up at her with an expression Ida did not have a word for and said: "Because I have been married to him for thirty-one years, constable, and there are four or five things in that time I have not asked, and every one of them is still in this house, and I have got them all in a row where I can see them."

Ida wrote nothing down. She had made the decision not to before she came in and she kept to it, which she thought afterwards was the single most useful thing she did in the whole eleven days. She sat at the table of a woman who was telling her something enormous and she kept her hands still.

"I am not going to make a statement," said Marit. "I want to be clear about that now and I will be clear about it in six months. But you asked eleven houses about a light and I have thought about nothing else since, and I want to say once, in my own kitchen, that on the Monday night my husband was not at the co-op, because the co-op is eight minutes away and a coat does not steam for an hour after eight minutes." She stood up. "That is all. You can find your own way out, you know it well enough."