The Line on the Map

The consultancy rang her back on the Tuesday morning, four days after her message, and the woman on the line was apologetic and businesslike and had clearly been told to be careful. Halvard Nesse had been contracted to run a level line along the six-hundred-and-forty metre contour of the Vasslia valley. Twenty-two stations. Due for delivery on the first of March.

"And what is at six hundred and forty?" A pause. "The proposed maximum operating level of the reservoir." Ida put her pen down. "There is going to be a reservoir." "There is a scheme at concession stage. It has been at concession stage for nine years. I would not want you to think anybody is digging anything."

"But the line matters." "The line is the whole thing," said the woman, and something in her voice loosened, the relief of a person who is finally allowed to talk about the interesting part. "Below the line you are inundated and you are bought out at agricultural value plus the disturbance formula. Above it you are not inundated and you get nothing, and your access road is under water, and your neighbours have all been paid."

"So above the line is worse than below it." "Above the line is very much worse than below it, for anybody with a seter or a summer barn on the wrong side of it. That is not my opinion, it is the third paragraph of every objection letter the scheme has ever had, and it has had two hundred and six."

Ida looked at the sketch map in the wet notebook, at the twenty-two little crosses going round the head of the valley. "Then somebody could look at Mr Nesse's twenty-two stations," she said slowly, "and work out to the half metre which side of that line their own ground was going to be on." "Yes. That is what the survey is for."

"And if a station were in the wrong place. If a benchmark had moved." Another pause, a different one. "Then the line would come out in the wrong place for the whole of that section, and it would not be found until somebody re-shot it, and depending on the direction of the error a piece of ground would end up on the paid side or the unpaid side by mistake." The woman cleared her throat. "Constable, is this a conversation I should be having with somebody more senior than me?"

"Not yet," said Ida, and then, because it was true and because the woman had been decent: "You have been more use to me in nine minutes than anyone else in three weeks. Can you send me his last upload?" She could. It came through at eleven. Station nineteen, shot on the fourth of February, and station nineteen shot again on the eighth, and between them fifty-four centimetres.

Fifty-four centimetres does not sound like anything. Ida wrote it on a sheet of paper and looked at it and it went on not sounding like anything, so she got the map out and did the work with a ruler and a pencil like a schoolchild, and it stopped being nothing somewhere around the fourth minute.

Station nineteen sat on the shoulder above Lidhaugen. The line ran west from it for eleven hundred metres across ground that rose at about one in forty, which meant that moving the station up by fifty-four centimetres moved the six-hundred-and-forty line something like twenty metres sideways on the ground, and the twenty metres it moved across was not empty.

The old seter at Lidhaugen stood in it. The barn, the two byres, the whole platform of flat ground the buildings sat on. With station nineteen as first shot on the fourth of February, Lidhaugen was below the line and was bought out. With station nineteen as Nesse re-shot it on the eighth, Lidhaugen was above the line and got nothing at all and lost its road.

Ida sat back. The stove ticked over the way it did when the wind got round to the north. Outside, somebody's dog was being told off in the street with great patience and no effect at all, and further off a plough was working the valley road, and she sat with a ruler in her hand and listened to a perfectly ordinary afternoon going on around a piece of arithmetic that had just changed everything.

Lidhaugen. The stove at Fjellstad had come out of Lidhaugen, because Lidhaugen was coming down anyway. Erling had said that on the second day, in her own office, unprompted, reading off a folder he had brought without being asked. Coming down anyway. She had written it down at the time because she wrote everything down and it had meant nothing whatever.

She rang the co-op and asked the girl, in the tone of someone confirming a detail for a form, who held the Lidhaugen seter. The girl said Brenna, and then said, unprompted, that it had been in the family a long time and that it was a shame about it going, and Ida agreed that it was a shame and thanked her and hung up and put both hands flat on the desk.

It was still not evidence. She knew that with complete clarity and she knew it in a way that no longer frightened her, because she had stopped, some time in the last few days, trying to build a thing that would satisfy the man on the telephone in Bergen. She was building a thing that would be true. Whether anybody could use it was a separate problem and it was not hers this week.

Sverre Lid lived alone in a house with three rooms shut off and one room very warm indeed, and he gave her coffee in a cup with a crack in it and told her about the winter of 1966 for eleven minutes before she got a word in, which she had budgeted for.

"The Fjellstad key," she said. "You had one." "Everybody had one." "The co-op says the old ones were called in and destroyed in October. There is a tick against everybody except you." Sverre laughed, one syllable of it. "There would be. I did not go to the meeting. I have not been to a meeting since they moved them to a Tuesday."

"So did you hand your key in?" "It is on the hook." He pointed with his chin at the back door, where there was a board with about fourteen keys on it and a great many empty hooks. "That one there. Second row." Ida went and looked. There was a key on a loop of orange baling twine with a scrap of card knotted into it, and on the card, in pencil, the word FJELLSTAD.

She stood there for a while with her back to the old man and made herself take a breath before she turned round. "Mr Lid, has anybody been in this kitchen since October?" "Half the valley has been in this kitchen since October, girl. It is the warm room." "Has Erling Brenna?" "Erling brings my paraffin on the second Sunday. He has done for nine years and he will not take anything for it."

She asked him, then, to look at the board very carefully and tell her whether anything about it had changed, and Sverre Lid got up, which took a while, and stood in front of the hooks with his hands behind his back like a man at an exhibition, and looked at them for a full minute.

"There were two," he said at last. "Two Fjellstads. They gave me two because the old lock was a devil and I lost one every summer, and I put both on the board when they were done with." He tapped the empty hook next to it. "That one has been empty a while. I could not tell you how long. I would not have looked."

Ida photographed the board, and the hook, and the key, and the card, and then she sat back down and drank the rest of the cold coffee and let Sverre Lid tell her about 1966, all of it, for another twenty minutes, because he had just handed her the whole case and had no idea and it seemed to her the very least she could do.

She wrote it out that night in the order it had happened rather than the order she had found it, which took three attempts, because the order it had happened in was the only order in which any of it was persuasive.

In October the lock at Fjellstad was changed and the old keys called in, and the man who called them in wrote in a minute that the last one out belonged to a member he described in a way that made the meeting stop asking. In fact there were two of that key, on a board in a warm kitchen that the same man walked into on the second Sunday of every month.

On the fourth of February a surveyor shot a benchmark on the shoulder above Lidhaugen. On the eighth he shot it again and got fifty-four centimetres of difference and wrote MOVED in his notebook in capitals and underlined it twice. Fifty-four centimetres put the Brenna family seter on the wrong side of a line worth, by the consultancy's own formula, something north of two million kroner.

On the Thursday the surveyor was in the shop, and a man asked him where he was stopping, in front of five witnesses, and was told Fjellstad. On the Monday the surveyor went up to Fjellstad with a key that had been given to him by somebody, on orange twine, with the name written on the card in a hand that was not his own.

The key did not fit. It had not fitted since October. He was nine hundred metres up in February with weather coming, two hundred metres from a shut door and eleven kilometres from anything else, and he did what a competent man does, which is start walking down, and he did not get far, because he was already colder than he thought he was.

Nobody struck him. Nobody was there. That was the thing Ida kept coming back to and it was the thing that would make the file so hard: there was no moment in the whole of it where anybody did anything to Halvard Nesse at all. There was a man in a warm kitchen taking a key off a hook, in October or in January, and knowing what it opened, which was nothing.

She read it through twice and it was, she thought, the best piece of work she had ever done, and it would be looked at by a prosecutor for about six minutes. She put it in the folder anyway. It was the twenty-sixth. The pass opened in two days.