Ida Joner is only 10 years old and too pretty to survive. This is what her mother Helga has been thinking for years until her worst nightmare becomes reality on a September evening. Pet lover Ida goes out with her yellow bike to buy her favourite horse magazine and does not return. A scenario her mother has been constantly rehearsing in her mind, yet she is unrehearsed when it happens. This is unlike anything she has imagined – it is much worse!
So begins the novel Black Seconds by the Norwegian author Karin Fossum, who is a familiar name to us.
In yet another case Inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre are challenged to find a girl who has seemingly vanished into thin air during the four- kilometre long road in the outskirts of Oslo. There are no witnesses, no traces. Not even a single shoe or part of the little girl’s yellow bike. Nothing! Nevertheless, Helga believes that if someone can find Ida, this is Inspector Sejer, the only one who brings tranquillity and stability into her crumbling life. While she sinks into despair, army of volunteers looks for the missing child, and Konrad Sejer searches for evidences left by the possible abductor, Karin Fossum fixes the reader’s attention on some of the closest characters to Helga.
Her sister Ruth has her own issues and they are far from being related to the frequent absence of her husband to which she has got used to. For instance, the odd behaviour of her son Tomme, who continues closing himself off, leaving Ruth desperate to understand what worries him. Something tortures the eighteen-year-old adolescent, apart from the broken armour of his new car. Well, no one cries at night because of a broken armour or cracked headlight. Is it possible that the missing of his cousin Ida is causing him more pain than he admits? Or has he got involved into something illegal along that friend of his Willy Osterhaus. Everyone knows about Willy’s infamous past.
Somewhere nearby, but somehow almost always close to all of them, is the weird and kind of eerie Emil Johannes, who wanders about every day with his busted adult trike. Has he seen something? Even so, there probably isn’t someone who can understand him, for he does not speak. Some say he can’t, others – that he doesn’t want to. Still he can say no when he has no other choice.
Extreme introvert, a psychologist, unable to explain his condition, tells his exhausted mother Else Kork. But no one knows what is going on inside Emil’s head and how well he recognises the sound of the words. And he recognises it just fine! But for someone to get close to him, a new language should be found, with different means of expression, that don’t terrify Emil as his voice does.
10 days after the disappearance of Ida, she is found, yet the mystery seems to get even more confusing and unsolvable. Why is she wearing that nightdress? Where are her clothes? Where is that red feather in her letterbox from? Who is Henry? …
We have already met with Inspector Sejer in the novel The Murder of Harriet Krohn, where he takes a step back and yields the strongest light to the murderer and their torments. In Black Seconds Karin Fossum again shows compassion and sensibility to all of her characters, despite the side of the law they are on or think they are on. This is one of the particularities of Fossum; she is truly able to see kindness everywhere, even in the darkest areas of one’s soul. The victims in her novels are frighteningly ordinary, just like the reader. Just like the killer.
Another particularity of hers is the manner in which she writes the crimes. They are almost never deliberate and intended; rather they are an unfortunate set of circumstances that turn someone into a murderer. The same can be said for the novel Black Seconds where no one is as bad as expected and is difficult to condemn the criminal. Reading the final pages of the novel the reader may not be surprised to find out who the guilty one actually is, nevertheless this does not make the reading any less enjoyable.
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Translation: Elisaveta Asparuhova