A clicking of keys, then Agnes replied. “Got it. 4:10 this morning.”
“Has anyone run the name on the patient yet?”
“Running it now,” Agnes said. “Nothing so far, though.”
“Okay—”
“Detective Huakaas?” the nurse said.
Arne pulled the phone away and held his hand over the microphone. “Yes?”
“There was one more thing. We didn’t show it to the other officer, because we didn’t know it until we went to change the sheets.”
“Show what to the officer?”
“Come see for yourself,” she said, waving an arm in the direction she was now headed.
“Agnes, I’ll call you back. Run the name and get back to me if you have any hits, okay?” He ended the call and hurried after the nurse.
Squashed into an elevator with the nurse, two porters, and a gurney laden with a brittle old woman riddled with tubes and breathing apparatus, Arne closed his eyes and took short, shallow breaths. He hated hospitals. Sterile and morbid, the air of decay and despair clung to the walls. No one ever wanted to go to the hospital. You went because you had to. There were other oppressive places one was forced to attend through guilt or obligation—church, the Statens Vegvesen for all driving license and car-related issues, the dentist. Only with hospitals could you enter and not come out again. A bit dizzy? Brain tumor. A numb foot? Incurable ALS. Arne had come in for reflux, which had turned out to be a heart attack. Within eighteen hours he was under the knife undergoing a triple bypass. He’d barely passed his fifty-second birthday.
Through a damp shirt, Arne rubbed at the thick scar in his chest. The whole thing had felt like punishment. For Aslaug. Some kind of sick karma, as if ex-communication from his daughter and exile to that shitty rabbit hutch hadn’t been enough. No, he apparently needed to be castigated further.
The elevator pinged, and Huakaas’s eyes sprang open. The nurse shuffled past the other occupants and around the cot on wheels. Arne quickly followed her out, purposefully avoiding eye contact with the withered, intubated woman. He looked death in the face often enough.
A short walk and they were in the cubicle which Georgina had been in the night before. The nurse stepped to the bed and yanked back the cover. Arne peered over her shoulder, a little apprehensive about what he was about to see. There, written in large black letters on the clean white under-sheet were the words: Quae seminaverit homo haec et metet.
Arne frowned. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s Latin,” the nurse said.
“Latin?”
His father would roll his eyes at how much Arne had forgotten from school. Latin was a dead language, but important for the sharp mind, apparently.
“I think so,” the nurse said. “We learn it in med school. I’m not sure what it says, but it looks like Latin. Homo is definitely the Latin word for man.”
“What the hell is she writing in Latin for?” Arne said, his brow thoroughly creased.
“Let’s see.” The nurse produced a phone from her pocket and began typing.
“What are you doing?” Arne asked.
“Online translator.” She showed him her screen. “See?”
Arne peered down his nose and blinked a few times, adjusting his eyes to the brightness of her phone. “What a man sows ... that he shall also reap,” he read out loud.
The nurse nodded.
Arne chewed his lip, now craving a cigarette. Was that a threat? Was she that angry he’d hit her with the car? She’d assaulted a doctor in her escape. The skinny, little woman with cancer had beaten down a large man.
“Okay, I’ll take a note,” he said finally. “If another officer comes, tell them Detective Huakaas was assigned.” He fished out a card and handed it to the nurse.
“Sure.” She took the card and slipped it into her pocket.
Arne took out his smartphone and snapped a picture of the bedsheet, but knew he had to keep this quiet. “You can wash them now,” he said, and without waiting for a reply, ambled out of the ward, down the corridor, and into the elevator. In a fog of thought, he meandered back out into the rain and sleet, which immediately attacked his face and woke him to reality. He shuddered violently and marched as quickly as his tired legs would allow to the car park, then climbed into his beat-up Saab. He turned over the engine and switched on the heating.
Slowly, the cabin began to warm. Arne rubbed his cold hands together and blew into them to speed up thawing his numb fingers. He should have been thinking about the fact he’d run over a woman and now she’d fled the hospital. He could be in deep shit. His mind still mulled the words scrawled across the bed sheets. Men reap what they sow. Men get what they deserve.
What do men deserve?
Someone rapped on his window.
Arne lowered it to see a parking attendant, face red with the cold, peering in at him.
“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t park here with the engine running like that,” he said, motioning to the cloud of fumes hanging in the air around Arne’s car. “Please turn it off or be on your way.”
Huakaas flashed his Kripos badge at the attendant, who seemed wholly unimpressed and simply coughed into his hand to emphasize the pollution being pumped out by the clapped-out Saab.
“I’m leaving,” Huakaas said, winding up the window without waiting for a response. That note on the bedsheet had sparked an idea. Something he hadn’t considered. He had to go back to the beginning.
The Saab choked and rattled as Arne pulled away, and as he turned the corner to exit the car park, he found himself wondering where Georgina Thompson was and if she was indeed now on the run. On the run from what? She couldn’t be who he was looking for, surely.
Huakaas rubbed his head. If she was as clever as she appeared when they had spoken, she’d be hiding and taking backstreets everywhere. Which, in Oslo, was not such a great idea for her, but maybe this error in judgment would be good for him. Her decision would keep her off the radar, which certainly worked in his favor.
Plymouth, England, 1995
The pink path. That’s what the kids called the winding rose-colored stone walkway that meandered through a small piece of scrubland behind her neighborhood. The shortcut shaved a good twenty minutes off the journey from home to school—the alternate route being to walk through Honicknowle Green and up a painfully steep hill, watching other kids whizz past on a public bus. Rey couldn’t afford the bus, or at least her mom couldn’t, so Rey never asked for the money. Instead, she walked three miles every day, there and back.
Until she discovered the pink path.
There were actually two ways through the scrubland—the stone path and an even shorter way through the grass. Both had advantages and disadvantages. The grass way was open and felt a lot safer. Grass on one side, a chain-link fence on the other blocking the way to a motorway where a few of her classmates had died playing chicken with the traffic. Idiotic in Rey’s mind.
The problem with the grass way was that it was just that—grass. In the rain or bad weather, she would appear on the other side with her shoes caked in mud. The pink path was much cleaner, being stone. So, Rey would arrive home clean as a whistle, shoes still shiny. And Rey liked to take care of her clothes—even her ugly gray school uniform with gaudy yellow and red tie—as her mom couldn’t afford to replace them. The issue with the pink path was she might not make it to school at all. Rumors of murders and rapes along the tree-lined and concealed walkway were rife. Such things were par for the course, though. Walking down her own street might result in her being attacked, too.
Just last week, in the street behind hers, Duncombe Avenue—a road even the police were not fond of entering—a man had had his fingers chopped off by some guy wielding a samurai sword. On her own street, the summer before, her neighbor had been assaulted—a sock full of snooker balls to the head, because he looked like someone the attackers didn’t like. Her neighborhood wasn’t as bad as Swilly, though. There, on Guy Fawkes night, cop cars wer
e turned over and telegraph poles were shoved through them before being set alight. Bonfires for the locals. Everything was about perspective. Rey’s neighborhood was bad, but it could be worse.
So, Rey chanced the pink path.
Today, she wasn’t coming home from school. She’d been to basketball practice—the girls' team. Rey thought it unbelievable she’d even made the team. The captain was the most popular girl in her year, and the team was made up of her cronies. Somehow, Rey had been accepted to play. Still, she relished the acceptance and would have walked through the fires of Hell to get to and from practice.
Halfway down the path in the dogleg bend, under the cover of trees, Rey was grabbed from behind. Fear immobilized her. The hands were strong, but not a man’s—a boy’s. Rey regained some confidence.
“Hey, get the fuck off me!” she growled through clenched teeth.
A second boy circled to face her. Karl Pearson. This was not good. That probably meant it was his cousin, John, behind her. The Pearsons were not to be crossed. John had already stabbed a teacher and been expelled.
Rey fell silent.
Karl grinned and cocked his head.
“I don’t have any money,” Rey said, the tingle of fear crackling across her skin.
Karl silently raised something to Rey’s forehead.
She nearly went cross-eyed trying to focus on it as he pressed it to her skin. A barrel. A trigger. He had a gun.
No, not a gun—a starting pistol, Rey thought, her fear now morphing into that analytical guise that allowed her to survey a situation. Still, even a starting pistol fired into her face would be fatal.
What did they want? Not money. To scare her, perhaps? She was scared. Or at least part of her was. To say otherwise would have been a lie, but another part—Strong Rey—wasn’t. Strong Rey didn’t want to play their game. So, instead, she just stood incredibly still and fixed her gaze on Karl. No crying. No begging. No pleading.
Her attacker’s gleeful expression drooped into frustration. He jerked the gun against Rey’s head, but she didn’t move. John yanked on her arms, perhaps hoping to elicit a squeal of pain. None came.
Anger flared in Karl’s eyes, and even Strong Rey’s resolve began to wane. Until Karl’s focus was drawn to something behind her. He gave a curt nod to his cousin, who must have checked on the new situation because he immediately let go and dashed with Karl into the trees.
Rey exhaled a long breath she didn’t remember holding.
A man, perhaps sixty-years-old, bowled past and eyed Rey suspiciously. To him, she was just another shitty teenager doing shitty things. Rey didn’t ask for help or proffer any sign there had been an altercation. If the Pearsons were watching, such an action would be suicide later. Instead, Rey tracked behind her unknowing savior for the rest of the journey along the pink path, until it connected with civilization.
The remaining ten-minute walk home was made in five. Rey slid the key into the lock and opened the front door to her house. Nobody was home. Saturday was food shopping day. Everyone was out, and with no car, they’d be a while.
Rey slumped into the soft sofa, her heart beating steadily but so powerfully that she could feel the pulse in her neck. She could have died today. Death did scare Rey to the point of panic attacks if she thought about it too much. The endless chasm beyond. The finality and nothingness. The undeniable eventuality. Death came for everyone—there was no control. Rey’s mission was to make sure she did as much with her life as possible before then. The crushing sensation spread from her stomach to her limbs as she spiraled into deep consideration of what it meant to die. Her breathing became rapid and her heart beat even faster.
Shit, shit, shit.
Rey needed a distraction. Something to make her feel better. She scanned the living room until her gaze fell upon the multimedia nook her dad had built with electronic goods gleaned from an insurance scam the year before.
He’d also hand-built the TV stand using abandoned red house bricks, topped with thick pine, stained to resemble dark oak. The illusion was of a cute little cubby. Her mom had wanted the inside of their home to look like a cottage, even if the outside was most definitely a council house and the street had knife-wielding thugs on it, rather than apple trees. Rey herself had sat for hours, hand-whittling long beams of pine that were then stained and fixed to the wall and ceiling, pretending to be struts and supports holding up an imaginary thatched roof.
Rey’s mom was good at pretending and building fantasy worlds. A bubble within Hell itself, only the Devil lived in there with them. Strangely, Joe would agree to help with these ventures, but would invariably do a half-assed job. They couldn’t afford a fitted-kitchen, so he built one—one where the cupboard doors fell off, the tabletop wasn’t attached to the legs, and he’d forgotten to paint the wall first, so he’d painted around the shelves. Grand ideas that were poorly executed.
However, as moronic as he seemed, he was also a sly bastard. The redbrick alcove shelf, for instance, was hollow. One of the bricks was not cemented in. Once removed, it was easy to slip an arm through and conceal something inside. In this case, a VHS tape with recorded soft porn.
Rey didn’t have a boyfriend. She’d had boyfriends along the way, but they never lasted long. She was grateful they wanted her and allowed them to treat her like crap. Rey knew this. In the end, the boys became frustrated because Rey would barely kiss them. For her, having someone in her face like that just felt odd, intrusive. Each time they leaned in, flashes of Joe trying to kiss her mother would interrupt the moment and her skin would crawl. Strangely, she was much more comfortable with more advanced sexual acts. Fingers in her panties. A hand in her bra. But the boys were just that—boys. Most bragged about the girls they’d slept with. Most lied. So, when she wouldn’t kiss them, they called her frigid or Pretty Woman, referring to the popular movie. Julia Roberts’s character, the escort, never kissed. Rey was, therefore, reduced to cheap soft porn her father recorded from German television late on a Friday night. He thought she didn’t know about the video. He was wrong.
Rey checked the window for anyone coming down the garden path.
No immediate danger.
She quickly stepped back to the alcove, removed the secret brick, and slipped her arm through. Her fingers clasped around the familiar shape of the tape. A quick wipe of the dust, then Rey switched on the TV—making sure the volume was low—and pushed the VHS into the loading slot of the player.
The screen filled with a young blonde woman, wearing only underpants, talking to the camera in German. She held a telephone in her hand, and there was a number embedded on the screen. Rey assumed it was another call service. Did Joe use it? Did he call Germany? It seemed unlikely, given they barely had money to call someone down the street. Though, he had sacrificed the money for their school shoes to buy a damn video recorder. Anything was possible with him.
Rey pressed the fast-forward button, hoping to get to something interesting before her family returned. The woman disappeared, replaced by adverts for unfamiliar German products and services. Then, Rey’s heart froze. She hit the play button, more out of instinct than some morbid desire to confirm what she thought she’d seen.
As Rey stared at the screen, her mother stared back—her gaze cold and dead, focused somewhere just slightly off-center. Rey’s heart now kicked into high gear, thumping against her ribcage. There was an awful, awkward rhythm to the way her mother’s head bobbed—for that’s all Rey could really see underneath the pale freckled skin of Joe’s back. He rutted and grunted—no more than a man-sized pig, rooting at her mother who just lay there, limp. As Rey studied her mother’s eyes, the stare she thought had been cold and dead was, in fact, sad and accepting, fixated on a single unknown spot that never wavered no matter how much her father thrust and shoved. Rey couldn’t tell if her mother had mentally escaped to some happier place or if she had just shut her mind down completely—now nothing more than Joe’s fuck toy.
Bile rose into Rey’s throat,
the acidic tingle growing into a burn the longer she waited to swallow. Her stomach twisted. In a panic, she ejected the tape, shoved it back into the hidden alcove, and replaced the brick. The TV clicked off and Rey sat in silence, the image of her mom’s haunted face burned into her brain.
Desperate to drown the image with something, anything, Rey stepped clumsily to the stereo and punched random on the CD player. It didn’t matter what was inside, as long as it was loud. Fate did not care what Rey wanted and decided to fuck with her. Instead of some powerful rock music or even gangster rap like Coolio—for which her mom had a growing penchant—the painful piano keys of Joshua Kadison’s “Mama’s Arms” rang out.
Rey folded into a heap.
The first time she’d heard this song, it had torn her in two. A track devoted to his mother who died when he was small, Kadison sang about the confusing pain of losing her, and how the little things, like wearing your Sunday best, just didn’t matter anymore. The key, the piano, and his soft voice singing lyrics as if told by a little boy in a trance at his mother’s funeral had broken Rey’s heart. His pain was hers now.
Though Rey had not lost her mother, she was aware there had been a suicide attempt, right before her mother had become pregnant some fifteen years ago. Since she could remember, Rey was aware that her very existence had stopped her mom from taking her own life. Rey sobbed on her own, evening light fading in the window.
A key turned in the lock and the front door opened.
Rey switched off the stereo but remained on the floor in front of it. Her father stormed in first. He scowled at Rey as he passed, then crashed onto the sofa, his feet by the fake open hearth. He picked up a newspaper next to the fish tank and pretended to read it.
A quick glance at her mother and Damien told her to keep quiet. Clearly, it had been a bad day for them. They disappeared upstairs. The familiar sound of rushing water indicated a bath was being run, probably for Riley.
A Time For Monsters Page 9
