For purely practical reasons – the axle on my police car had broken earlier in the day – I had taken a local train to Smestad. So, at nine minutes past ten, I boarded the train back into the city centre. It was a very quiet summer’s evening in Smestad. I had been the only passenger waiting on the platform.
It was just as I sat down that I saw her for the first time. She emerged very suddenly from the darkness on the road leading up the platform. And she was moving fast, extremely fast.
My first thought was that she must be a top athlete, as I could not remember having seen a woman run so fast before. Then I imagined that I might soon see a man with an axe or a scythe running after her. But there was no sign of any pursuer, even though I could see a good twenty to thirty yards behind her. In fact, there was no one else to be seen out there. And yet the woman ran even faster, despite her extremely tight jeans, hurtling towards the last door of the last carriage. It dawned on me that she might in fact be a madwoman as, despite her speed, she was running in a very odd way. Twice she hopped to the left at full speed, and once to the right.
Despite her tremendous exertion, she did not manage to reach the train in time. The doors slid shut right in front of her. It felt as though the entire carriage shuddered when she ran into them. For a couple of seconds, we stared at each other through the glass windows in the doors. I could see that she had long blonde hair and guessed that she was in her mid-twenties and slightly taller than average. It was, however, her face that struck me. It was a frozen mask of fear. The blue eyes that stared into mine were as wide as could be.
The doors did nothing to stop the young woman’s desperation. She hammered on them with her fists in despair and then pointed a trembling finger at me, or at something behind me.
I turned around automatically but could see no one else in the carriage. It was only once the train had left Smestad station that I realized she had been pointing at the emergency cord on the wall.
I sat and thought about this strange encounter with the woman on the Lijord Line all the way back into town. The trains were still running every twenty minutes, so it could surely not have been such a disaster that she missed it. By the time I got off at Nationaltheatret, I had dismissed the whole incident, having convinced myself that she was obviously a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I did not regret that I had lacked the sense to use the emergency brake, and thought to myself it was just as well as I would probably never see her again.
