MAGGI

The little heart beside the doorframe was so beautiful. Painted with red nail varnish, at a six-year-old child’s eye level. Maggi had spotted it the first time she had cleaned in here, only a few weeks after the lady of the house had passed away. Her initial impulse had been to scrape it off. She would prove herself worthy of the job. Even though she had come with good references, Jan Morell seemed both sceptical and strict. She was given a three-month trial period, and the bathroom had to shine. Just as she was about to remove the hard lacquer from the surface with a stove scraper, she changed her mind. Instead she covered the heart with a length of sticky tape and scrubbed down the rest of the room.

She had continued to do that.

She also took care of the doorframe. While the rest of the bathroom was always washed down with water and detergent, bleach and other chemicals, she merely wiped the doorframe painstakingly with a dry-fibre cloth over the wood where Hege’s growth chart was drawn in pens of various colours.

Maggi enjoyed being with the little Morell family. Before she was employed there, she had been in Norway for six months. She’d had cleaning jobs with eleven families. All paying on the black market. Only one of them had bothered enough to learn her name.

Magdalena Wajda.

It was eleven-year-old Hege who had shortened it to Maggi, which had delighted Magdalena. And the little girl’s father had paid her wages. Proper wages, into her bank account each month, in accordance with a contract that they had renegotiated every second year. The pay was good. If somewhat less than illegal casual workers received, she had in addition free board and lodgings in a cosy bedsit in the basement. She acquired a pension. She had rights to sickness benefit, though she had never taken a single day off work. With preparing food and washing clothes as well as cleaning the house, her work was varied and far less physically demanding than driving from address to address to scrub floors for people she never met.

Maggi loved Hege.

Jan Morell was strict and sometimes condescending, even though he treated her fairly. The man had seemingly never been attached to any new woman after becoming a widower. If he had, then he kept her at a distance, and that was just as well. The timber house in Vettakollen was Maggi Wajda’s domain. She took a fortnight’s holiday in her homeland every summer, plus a Christmas break with her sister in Wroclaw, but otherwise stayed put in the little cul-de-sac up on the fringes of the forest.

Hege was a quiet child. Mild-natured. When Maggi met her for the first time, she kept two hamsters in a cage in her room. They were called Kavring and Jonatan, even though they were both females. The very first night, after a slightly taken-aback Maggi had agreed to put Hege to bed, the little girl had come in to her with the cage. Kavring and Jonatan would stay with Maggi for three nights. To bring her comfort and keep her company in this new, strange house.