Sandberg is the prosperous residential district east of Bjerkås where Johnny Beskow singles out Astrid and Helge Landmark’s home for a cruel deception. Its neat houses and quiet domestic routines form an unsettling contrast with Helge’s rapidly advancing illness: in Sandberg, an ordinary telephone call and a car at the gate can make death seem to have arrived before its time.

Setting and Approach

The road to Sandberg cuts through yellow fields, passes a church and Lake Skarve, and runs through Bjerkås town centre before heading toward Kirkeby and then east. As Johnny rides toward Sandberg, the landscape signals a change in circumstance. The houses are larger and better kept than those at Askeland, with Swiss-style designs, double garages, broad gardens, small fountains, and solar-powered lights along their driveways. The details make prosperity visible as a domestic display, each property apparently settled and secure.

Near the centre of Sandberg, Johnny passes a grassy slope beside a playing field and an enormous house on the opposite side of the road. At Sandbergveien 15, he notices a couple sitting outside in the sun. The address becomes more than a point on his route: it is the home he watches, identifies, and turns into the target of a hoax. The surrounding calm does not protect the Landmarks from what follows; instead, it gives the intrusion a precise, familiar setting, at their own gate and in view of their garden.

The Landmark Home

Johnny pulls off the road, lays his moped on the slope, and squats in the grass to watch the couple. When they notice him, he pretends to make a telephone call until their attention returns to one another. From this concealed position he studies Helge, whose body is hunched and emaciated, whose legs cannot support him, and whose breathing depends on a tube in his neck. Astrid moves around him, holding a cup to his mouth, wiping his face, and adjusting the pillow behind his back. Their untouched food and her repeated acts of care make the illness present not as an abstract condition but as the terms of an ordinary afternoon.

Johnny walks to the mailbox, reads the name and address, then returns to the slope and obtains the Landmarks’ telephone number through directory enquiries. When he calls, Astrid goes inside to answer, leaving Helge alone in the garden. The brief separation exposes how dependent he is on her help: if he needs something, he may have to shout, though he has little strength even to make himself heard. The quiet garden, which had looked like a private refuge, becomes a place where his helplessness is visible to the person watching him.

Inside the house, Astrid tries to manage the future by keeping busy. She irons clothes, although Helge’s shirts are already smooth from the dryer and he will not wear them again; she plans more washing, bread-making, and household chores. Her practical routines hold at bay questions about death, burial, the house, and the cabin at Blefjell. The home therefore carries both the physical work of caring for Helge and the unspoken knowledge that the couple have little time left together.

The False Funeral Pickup

That fragile routine is shattered when a large black car with a cross on its roof backs into the driveway. It is a hearse. Astrid watches from the window as a man in a dark suit gets out and looks toward the house; Helge, who has also heard the car, asks anxiously whether someone is coming and whether they will have to enter. The vehicle’s slow approach, its tyres on the gravel, and the slammed door make the ordinary driveway seem to have become the threshold of a funeral. Astrid panics and tries to prevent Helge from seeing the car, while he is unsettled by the prospect of visitors seeing him in his diminished condition.

The deception strikes at the particular fears already shaping their life. Helge is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a rapidly progressing illness diagnosed only six months earlier, and the couple know that he will lose the ability to swallow, speak, and breathe. The hearse turns that anticipated death into an apparent arrival at their door. When Helge later manages to confront the funeral-home men and asks Astrid for cognac, the encounter briefly makes him feel like a man again; the drink then leaves him drowsy and weak, returning him to the wheelchair and the equipment on which he depends. The prank does not change his prognosis, but it forces the prospect of death into the present and compounds an already severe loss of dignity and control.

Sandberg as a Point of Exposure

The incident becomes a subject of public discussion. People wonder how someone could make a telephone call that frightens and humiliates a dying couple, and the case prompts questions about procedures surrounding death. Arnesen of Memento Funeral Home had no reason to doubt the caller’s polite voice: the exchange depended on the ordinary trust through which a funeral home conducts its work. In Sandberg, then, the deception exploits not only the Landmarks’ vulnerability but also a system built on the assumption that callers are acting honestly. Helge refuses to speak to newspapers, but the fact that he is dying becomes known, and the false visit is remembered as death having made a preparatory call at his home.

The address also becomes a point in Sejer’s effort to identify the person terrorizing residents. Helge says he did not see the person who rang the doorbell but heard him leave on a moped. Soon afterward, a young man unknown to Astrid appears at the house asking for directions to Sandberg Centre. Sejer, outraged by what the couple have endured, asks whether they have been harassed before and whether they know who sent the car. The house thus joins a wider pattern of false calls and misleading appearances, while its gate and driveway remain the concrete place where that pattern invaded a family’s private life.

Sandberg’s narrative force lies in that contrast: the landscaped roads and well-kept homes suggest security, yet the Landmark episode shows how little protection a respectable address offers against calculated deception. The hearse is not merely an ominous symbol placed in a prosperous neighborhood. It is a real vehicle delivered through trusted procedures to a real home, where a husband’s genuine fear of death and a wife’s exhausting care are already shaping every ordinary task.