Thomas Quick

by Hannes Råstam

  TQ: I don’t know.

  PENTTINEN: Should we carry on?

  TQ: Yes, let’s carry on. The fox must be red.

  PENTTINEN: I can’t hear what you’re saying.

  TQ: The fox must be dead.

  PENTTINEN: The fox?

  TQ: The Jewish boy.

  PENTTINEN: The Jewish boy must be dead?

  Thomas Quick seems to be lost in the mists, and Penttinen is concerned.

  PENTTINEN: Are you with us, Thomas?

  TQ: Mm.

  But Thomas is not with them. Mentally he is in an entirely different place.

  PENTTINEN: (repeats) Are you with us, Thomas?

  Quick again hums an answer.

  PENTTINEN: We’re coming up to a crossing here. Now you have to decide the way, Thomas. Should we go to the right? You’re nodding to the right.

  The car turns right.

  PENTTINEN: Here there’s a turn to the left.

  TQ: Keep going straight.

  PENTTINEN: Shall we carry on?

  TQ: Mm.

  PENTTINEN: Straight on.

  TQ: We can go where you find . . . so we can . . .

  PENTTINEN: Turn round?

  TQ: Mm.

  Thomas Quick’s droning voice now only hums his answers and soon he closes his eyes.

  PENTTINEN: Now you’re closing your eyes. How are you?

  TQ: Stop a while. Over there.

  The convoy stops. Quick sits in silence with his eyes closed. The terrain where the car has stopped does not correspond in any way to the description given earlier by Quick. There is no levelled piece of land here and certainly no gravel pit. The van has stopped on a long slope in a rolling Norwegian forest.

  Quick sees a hill. He decides to walk to the top and is accompanied by Seppo Penttinen, Birgitta Ståhle, Claes Borgström and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström.

  PENTTINEN: Are we within walking distance now of the place where Therese is?

  TQ: Yes.

  Quick is so unsteady on his legs now that Ståhle and Penttinen have to keep him on his feet by taking an arm each. You can see that they’ve done this before. They make their way up to the top of the hill, where the whole group stands in silence. Finally Penttinen speaks up.

  PENTTINEN: You’re looking down at the road, by that curve down there. And now you nod. Is there something special about that place? Try to describe it.

  TQ: (in a monotone, almost whispering) The curve leads . . . up steps.

  PENTTINEN: What did you say? The curve what?

  TQ: Leads steps up.

  It is difficult to make much sense of Quick, who seems completely drugged.

  PENTTINEN: Can you see the place from here?

  Quick is immobile. He closes his eyes.

  PENTTINEN: You’re nodding and closing your eyes at the same time.

  Quick has opened his eyes and sees something at the bottom of the slope. They agree it’s a shoulder of rock.

  ‘Shall we try to get down to that spruce tree?’ Quick suggests at long last.

  They walk towards a little spruce tree and, when they get there, stand in silence once again. Quick whispers something inaudible. He’s helped to light a cigarette.

  ‘Is the curve in that direction?’ he wonders, pointing with his arm.

  ‘It is,’ Birgitta Ståhle confirms.

  ‘I want to have a look at it,’ says Quick, and starts moving in the direction he has just been indicating.

  The ground is covered in old branches and it is difficult to make much progress. Quick starts stamping on the branches. Penttinen grabs him.

  Quick has a total freak-out and starts shouting, ‘You bastard! Bloody bastard swine! You bloody bastard swine! Bloody bastard swine!’

  Quick stamps and thrashes with his arms but is quickly overpowered. He ends up at the bottom of a heap of police and care assistants. Seppo Penttinen turns to the camera, as if to make sure that this is being properly documented. There is something triumphant about Penttinen’s expression when he looks into the camera, filming this dramatic moment.

  Someone has indicated to Christer van der Kwast that dramatic things are unfolding in the Norwegian undergrowth. He comes running into shot, wearing a shiny black suit. Quick is lying down, growling intently, a low, rhythmical sound.

  Everyone in the company knows that Quick has undergone a transformation; he has assumed one of the multiple personalities he harbours within. This is a figure referred to by him and his therapist as Ellington – the evil figure of the father, the murderer – who has taken over Quick’s psyche and body.

  ‘Thomas,’ says Penttinen in a pleading tone, while Quick continues making his noises.

  Birgitta Ståhle tries to connect with her patient. ‘Sture! Sture! Sture! Sture! Sture!’ she says.

  But Quick carries on being Ellington, and he growls back. ‘Gone for ever,’ he says in a thick, dark voice. ‘Gone for ever!’

  He growls again. ‘And people will step on your slut snout,’ he roars.

  Ståhle makes another attempt to gain access to her patient, who is now calming down.

  Quick is helped onto his feet and the whole group moves silently towards a height, where Quick sits down with his back to the camera. Penttinen, Ståhle and Anna Wikström are holding him. They remain sitting in silence for a long time.

  ‘Tell us now,’ Penttinen asks.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ says Quick, irritated. ‘I have to . . .’

  ‘What are you going to tell us?’ Birgitta wonders.

  ‘No, no! Don’t disturb me!’

  Quick isn’t ready to start talking yet. No one has asked him what happened to that gravel pit he promised them. Or what he meant when he said that Therese would be found in an area of ‘levelled ground’.

  Quick starts whispering and, in a scarcely audible voice, speaks of how Therese ‘was gone for ever when I left her’. The boys were still here but she was gone for ever. Therese’s body is within an area between the spruce tree and the hilltop, he says.

  ‘It’s not enough, Thomas,’ says Penttinen. ‘It’s too big.’

  They reach a stalemate. Quick has not been able to deliver a body, nor a gravel pit and not even a levelled area of ground. And Penttinen is not accepting a vague suggestion that Therese is somewhere in the forest. He is demanding more than that.

  Quick asks to speak privately with Claes Borgström. They step aside and the camera is turned off.

  When recording is resumed fifteen minutes later, Quick disjointedly slurs something about ‘a boy is mutilated by a car on packed earth’. He says that he has just been up on a hill and seen a boggy pond ‘with certain stones’. This is the spot where ‘the broken girl has been hidden’, he says.

  Quick wants to mark out a triangle in the forest where Therese’s body may be found. Together they establish the outline of this triangle, the base of which is formed by a line from a spruce tree to ‘almost down to the pond’. From this baseline, the tip of the triangle reaches ‘two-thirds of the way up to the top of the hill’.

  When the group has completed this time-consuming exercise, they start walking in the direction of the pond. Penttinen explains how he has to hold on to Quick, ‘in view of what happened earlier’.

  Quick growls by way of an answer.

  ‘Are you having difficulties looking at the pond, Thomas?’ asks Penttinen.

  Quick growls.

  ‘Talk so we can understand,’ says Penttinen.

  By now, they have reached the pond.

  ‘When you walk by this pond, you start reacting to something,’ says Penttinen. ‘Do you recognise it in some way? Yes, you’re nodding. What does that mean?’

  ‘I want us to go a little further,’ says Quick. ‘I might need a bit of support.’

  Quick is now so heavily drugged that he is walking with great difficulty. He has clearly been given more tranquillisers.

  ‘I can’t carry you, you have to understand that,’ says Penttinen.

  However, Quick doesn
’t seem to be understanding very much at all at this point. What he says is almost impossible to make out, and although he’s being propped up he is struggling to make forward progress.

  ‘We’re waiting, Thomas, there’s no hurry. We’ll keep going for as long as you can stay on your feet.’

  ‘Can I have a look at the pond?’ asks Quick.

  ‘But you have your eyes closed, Thomas!’ says Penttinen. ‘Try to open them. We’re right here.’

  Quick asks if Gun is there. Gun is Sture’s twin sister, whom he has not seen for a number of years.

  Anna Wikström explains that she is not Gun.

  ‘It’s Anna standing here,’ she says.

  Quick keeps his eyes shut.

  ‘I’m going to look at the pond,’ he says.

  ‘We’re here,’ says Penttinen.

  ‘Try to look,’ Wikström urges.

  ‘I’m looking,’ says Quick.

  ‘Why do you react like that?’ Penttinen wonders.

  ‘Because those boulders there . . .’

  Again Quick runs out of words. A moment later he asks to speak to Birgitta Ståhle without the camera and microphone. By the time the video camera is turned back on after a twenty-minute interval, Quick has made a new statement. Claes Borgström has to explain what he has said. Quick will not answer any further questions.

  Penttinen seems overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment, if also slightly concerned that Quick, in the last hour, has given several different versions of what happened to Therese. He knows that it is Quick’s normal pattern of behaviour to make ‘conscious deviations’ from things that are difficult, in a psychological sense, to approach. Now he wants to assure himself that this emerging version is the truth.

  ‘Before Claes explains I want some clarification,’ says Penttinen.

  He leans towards Quick and talks to him intimately.

  ‘These two places we’ve filmed here which you’ve distinctly pointed out, are they 100 per cent certain for you? Without any variations, in the sense of deviations?’

  Quick, speaking with difficulty, assures him that this time he is telling the truth: ‘The deviations have partly been about this story about gravel . . .’

  He sounds as if his batteries have run out mid-sentence.

  ‘The gravel pit?’ Penttinen fills in.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ says Quick.

  As soon as Quick has stepped aside it is time for Claes Borgström to give a little presentation to camera, with the boggy pond in the background.

  ‘So what’s happened here is that at point one, this crotch-like formation, he massacred Therese’s body. In other words there are no whole body parts left. No larger pieces of bone. Then he’s taken the body parts, after massacring the body, into this depression here. Then finally he’s swum out into the middle of the pond and let go of them, then gone back and fetched more. Some of them have sunk to the bottom and others have floated off in various directions. So there’s a point three in his story and it’s the pond.’

  That was all Claes Borgström had to say on behalf of his client. The reconnaissance in Ørje Forest was over and the last video tape had come to an end.

  Noise and static started on the TV and I felt almost as divorced from reality as Thomas Quick when I looked around my room, brightening now in the light of early morning, at the First Hotel Ambassadeur in Drammen. The copying had taken almost twelve hours and it was eight in the morning. I was bewitched by what I had seen in the films: a sizeable delegation of Swedish civil servants allowing themselves to be led about by a drugged psychiatric patient who clearly had no idea where he was. Could they really not have understood? No, I thought. It wasn’t possible. Could they really have believed he knew where Therese was? Even though he first spoke of a gravel pit; then, finding there was no gravel pit, a spruce tree; then within a certain triangle in the forest. Finally, she was ‘massacred’ and submerged in a pond.

  It was difficult to accept that these highly educated representatives of a range of academic disciplines had not seen through the performance. With assumed or actual naivety they all took Quick’s information seriously, and it was determined that the pond would be drained.

  A very large number of police constables from several of Norway’s districts took part in this work for seven weeks, with additional support from home guard personnel and external experts. First, the top layers of soil in the areas pointed out by Quick were peeled back and all the material manually sieved and examined by cadaver dogs and forensic archaeologists. After this unproductive Sisyphean task had been concluded, the even more laborious job of draining the small boggy pond commenced. Thirty-five million litres of water were pumped out and filtered; the bottom sediments were vacuumed until layers that were estimated to be 10,000 years old were reached. When nothing at all was found, everything was filtered a second time, but still not even the tiniest fragment of Therese was found.

  Once again, the extremely costly investigation led to the inevitable conclusion that what Quick had said was untrue.

  The fact that nothing was found after the pond had been drained called for an explanation from Quick. At this point he changed his mind and said that he had hidden Therese’s body in a gravel pit.

  While the Norwegians continued scouring the forest and surrounding terrain, Quick was repeatedly questioned by Seppo Penttinen. And so the investigation continued to focus on Ørje Forest until the technicians – finally! – found the remains of a few fires, in which there were burnt pieces of bone.

  One of those who examined the finds in Ørje Forest was the Norwegian professor Per Holck, who soon reached the decision that some of the bone fragments were human in origin and came from a person aged between five and fifteen.

  How could you challenge a professor at the anatomical department of Oslo University, who had confirmed that these were indeed the body parts of a child, found precisely where Quick claimed to have disposed of a nine-year-old girl’s body by cremation? And still . . .

  The story was too odd for me to be able to believe it.

  I had set myself the task of scrutinising the prosecutor’s strongest case, Therese Johannesen, and afterwards I tried to summarise my position. What I had seen had pretty well convinced me that Quick did not murder Therese. It was worrying but also exceptionally impractical. It was becoming increasingly difficult to talk to the protagonists on the opposing sides of the Quick feud.

  I had also discovered another thing, which no one else seemed to be aware of: Sture Bergwall, the person I had met at Säter, had nothing at all in common with the drugged mental patient who, under the name of Thomas Quick, had stumbled about in various forests, muttering incoherently about how he had murdered, chopped up, desecrated and eaten his victims. I had also hit upon the only reasonable explanation, namely that Quick had been encouraged to take large amounts of narcotic-strength medications.

  I realised I had to control myself. So far, insights and information were still little more than hypotheses. Many questions remained to be answered. Above all I was thinking about that burnt piece of child’s bone, found in Ørje Forest, exactly where Quick had said that he burned Therese’s remains.

  I went back to Sweden filled with a great sense of doubt, well aware that I had now joined the side of the sceptics.

  After my return I phoned Sture Bergwall, who was very curious about how my work was going. I told him about my trip to Fjell and Ørje Forest and about my meetings with Norwegian police officers.

  ‘Oh, you’re really putting a lot of work into this! So you’ve been in Norway and Ørje Forest?’

  Sture was deeply impressed by my endeavours, but more than anything he seemed interested in the conclusions I had reached.

  ‘So what do you think about it?’ he wondered.

  ‘To be honest I have to say that this whole trip to Norway and what I saw there have made me rather hesitant.’

  ‘In that case I’d like you to tell me what’s on your mind next time you come up here,’ sa
id Sture.

  I cursed my own loose tongue, which would most likely mean that my next meeting with Sture would also be the last. We decided that I would come to Säter one week later, on 17 September 2008.

  I was going to be honest. If he chose to throw me out, so be it.

  SÄTER HOSPITAL, WEDNESDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2008

  WHEN WE MET for the third time in the visiting room at Säter Hospital, Sture Bergwall said, ‘Now I want to hear what you really think about it all.’

  It was an unpleasant request.

  After all, Quick had said that he took time out because of people disbelieving his confessions. What would happen if I also questioned them?

  I tried to temper the bitter pill with a generous measure of humility.

  ‘I wasn’t there when the murders were committed. I wasn’t at the court hearings. I can’t say what’s true. All I can do is work with hypotheses.’

  I could see that Sture was following my line of reasoning and that he accepted my description of the premises.

  ‘When I was in Norway I had the opportunity to carefully study the video recordings from your reconnaissance of the crime scene in Norway. I’ll tell you what I saw: you were given an addictive narcotic, a very strong drug, Xanax, in large doses. While you were being taken round you seemed very much under the influence of it. And when you got to Ørje and you were supposed to show them the place where Therese was buried you didn’t seem to have a clue what to do next.’

  Sture was listening now, very attentively. His face had a concentrated expression but he did not reveal how he felt about what I was saying.

  ‘You were unable to show the police to the gravel pit, as you’d promised,’ I carried on. ‘You couldn’t show them the way to Therese’s body. You behaved as if you’d never been in that place before.’

  I looked at Sture, my shoulders hoisted up tentatively.

  ‘I don’t know what the truth is. But as I said when I called you, I began to feel very hesitant.’

  Sture looked straight ahead with an empty stare. We sat there for a long while, neither of us saying anything. Again, I was the one to break the silence.