The Pass Opens

She did not arrest him, because she had nothing to arrest him for and because she had thought about it for two nights and had concluded that the version of this in which she went up the track with the handcuffs was the version in which it all went away. So she rang and asked him to come in, and he came in, and he brought no folder this time, which she noticed.

She put it to him in order, the way she had written it, and she did it without any of the tricks, because he was not a man who would fall for a trick and because she had decided that she wanted him to hear it. It took nineteen minutes. He listened to the whole of it without once interrupting, which almost nobody does.

"I gave him a key," said Erling Brenna at the end of it. "I will say that now and I will say it in a court. He asked in the shop where he might stop and I said Fjellstad and I said I would find him a key, and I went and got him one, and I gave it him on the Friday outside the co-op." He put his hands on his knees. "I did not know it was the old one."

"It was on Sverre Lid's board." "Half the keys in this valley are on somebody's board." "You wrote the minute that said the old ones were called in." "I wrote a minute in November about a lock in October. If I had remembered every word of it I would be a better chairman than I am."

"Your coat steamed for an hour on the Monday night." And there, for the first time in three weeks, something moved in his face. It was very small and it was gone in under a second and Ida saw the whole of it, and what was in it was not fear and was not guilt, and she thought about it for years afterwards and the closest she ever got was that it was grief with the lid on.

"I went up," he said. "Monday, late. I went up the track as far as the trees and I stood there a long while and it was coming in and I could not see the hut, and I told myself he was in it, and I came down." He looked at her steadily. "That is what I did. You can make of it what you want and so can they, and I will tell it the same in Bergen."

"Why did you go up?" And Erling Brenna sat in a room behind a community hall with a stove going and said, in the reasonable voice he had used about hut felt and grazing rotas and the state of the road: "Because at about six o'clock on the Monday it occurred to me which key I had given him."

The pass opened at eleven and the first thing over it was a gritter and the second was a car from Bergen, and by two in the afternoon her room behind the hall had three people in it she had never met and one of them was the man from the telephone. He was younger than the voice and considerably more decent than the voice.

He read the file. He read it for fifty minutes without saying anything at all, and he read the survey pages twice, and at the end of it he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes and said, "Constable, why did you try the key in the lock?"

"Because nobody had." "Nobody had because nobody thought of it. I would not have thought of it. I have been doing this for eighteen years and I would have read the word FJELLSTAD on a bit of card in a dead man's pocket and I would have written had access to shelter and moved on, and that sentence would have gone in the report and it would have been wrong." He put his glasses back on. "Right. Tell me what you think it is."

"I think it is not murder." She had decided to say that first, and watched him not react, and understood that this was why he had asked. "There was no intention that he should die. I think a man wanted a survey not finished before the first of March and gave another man a key that would not open a door, and I think he understood at about six o'clock on the tenth what that meant and got as far as the treeline."

"Gross negligence causing death." "Or nothing at all, if the fifty-four centimetres does not stand up." "The fifty-four centimetres will stand up. That is the strongest thing in here and you have not noticed, because it is the only piece of it that does not depend on anybody in this valley telling the truth." He tapped the survey printout. "Numbers off a machine, uploaded from the field, timestamped. That is what we will build it on."

They talked for another hour about the benchmark, and whether it could be shown to have been moved by hand, and who would have to go up and look at it in April, and what it would cost, and whether the consultancy would fight. It was, Ida realised somewhere in the middle of it, the first professional conversation she had had in six years.

At the end he stood and put his coat on and said, "There will be a charge. I am not going to tell you it will be the charge you want." "I did not know I wanted one." "You want manslaughter and you are not going to get it, and in about a year you will decide that is roughly correct, and it will still make you angry." He held the door. "That part does not improve. I am sorry."

They found the sister in Trondheim on the second of March. She had been ringing his phone for eleven days and had assumed what people assume about a brother who does not answer, which is that he is being a brother who does not answer. Ida was not the one who told her; Bergen did that properly, with a woman trained for it, which she was grateful for and then obscurely ashamed of being grateful for.

But the sister rang the valley station a week later and asked, in the very level voice people use for this, whether the constable could tell her what the place looked like. Not the scene. The place. Whether it was ugly.

Ida sat down on the edge of the desk and told her. She told her about the shoulder in the blue light and the line of the ridge behind it and the way you can see forty kilometres up the valley from that shelf on a hard clear day, and the birch coming up through the snow lower down, and the fact that the hut had a good stove in it and a full stack of wood.

"He would have liked that," said the sister. "He was very boring about firewood." And then she cried for a while and Ida sat and listened to it, which is a thing they do not train you for either and which she had by then done four times in her career, and it does not get easier and she had stopped expecting it to.

The dog was called Bjørn and was nine and had been in a kennel in Voss since the ninth of February on a booking that had been made for four days. The sister could not take him, having two already and a flat. The kennel had been very good about it and had stopped charging some time in the second week without mentioning that they had.

Ida drove to Voss on her rest day and did not tell anybody in the valley she was going, which was pointless, because by the time she was back over the pass three separate people had already heard, and by the Friday somebody had left a bag of dog food on the step of the station with no note on it.

He was a large grey thing with a bad hip and no opinions and he settled in front of her stove on the first evening as though he had been doing it for years. She sat with a beer and a file that was no longer hers and a dog she had not intended to have, and she thought: this is not a tidy ending, and there is not going to be one, and I am going to have to be all right with that.

The charge, when it came in November, was negligence causing death. Erling Brenna pleaded not guilty in January, changed it in March, and was sentenced in June to a term that the valley considered savage and the sister considered an insult, and both of them said so to Ida, at different times, in the same shop.

The scheme went to concession in the autumn and was refused, on grounds that had nothing to do with any of it, and Lidhaugen was still standing the last time Ida drove past, roofless and going over slowly at one corner, above a line on a map that nobody would ever now need.

Marit Brenna never made a statement. She sold the home farm in the second year and moved to her daughter's in Steinkjer, and she stopped Ida in the car park of the shop on the day before she went and said only, "You did not write it down," and Ida said no, and Marit nodded once and got in the car and that was the end of it.

Sverre Lid died at eighty-seven, of nothing in particular, in the warm room. The board of keys went to a nephew who threw the lot in a drawer. Ida had asked, quietly, some years earlier, whether she might have the Fjellstad one, and had been told to take it, and had then found she did not want it after all and had left it on the hook.

She stayed. She had not expected to and could not entirely account for it, except that somewhere in those eleven days the valley had stopped being a place she was posted to. They did not forgive her, exactly. It was more that they made room, in the way that a valley does, by simply continuing to be there in the morning.

What she thought about, when she thought about it, was not Erling Brenna in the room behind the hall and not the fifty-four centimetres and not the minute with the word deceased in it. It was a man standing on a step at nine hundred metres, in the last of the light, turning a key that went in two thirds of the way and stopped, and trying it again, because everybody tries it again.

Nine tenths of winter, her grandmother used to say, is the part you can see coming. Ida had never once understood what the old woman meant by it and had repeated it for thirty years regardless, and standing on the Fjellstad step one clear afternoon in April with a bad-hipped dog asleep on the snowmobile behind her, she thought that perhaps it meant this: that the tenth is the one that does it, and it is always two hundred metres from somewhere warm.