Certain Signs that You are Dead

by Torkil Damhaug

  She sat up, rubbed her hands against her cheeks. The time was quarter past one. Even with the window open, the heat in the room was oppressive. As she heard the sound of a helicopter taking off from the emergency pad down by the hospital, she gave up and went into the kitchen, phone in hand. She called Zoran, hardly expecting he would be able to take the call. He’d gone on duty at eight, and Saturday night was usually hell. She was about to text him a message. Jumped as the phone began to vibrate in her palm, like some little animal woken by the few words she was thinking of sending him.

  A hospital number on the display. Why not? she thought. The night’s ruined anyway. She’d had a hectic day at the end of a long, hard week. She was behind in her research and would have to work Saturday to catch up. But what bothered her most was the thought of all the other things she should have done. First and foremost called Trym. Ideally driven out to the farm and talked to him.

  – Plåterud, she answered, a hint of irritation in her voice. Before too long she was going to stop using that surname, reclaim her own.

  It was the chief physician, and she dropped the irritation at once. He would never call her after midnight unless it was something really important.

  – We’ve got a situation at the hospital.

  – Situation? she said. – Isn’t that why we have hospitals?

  – Murder.

  She had received similar telephone calls many times before. In all the years she had worked at the forensic institute, it meant she had to drop everything and make her way out to a crime scene. But now that she had stopped working there and found a quiet haven as an ordinary pathologist and researcher, she’d fallen out of the habit of being always prepared.

  – I contacted the forensic people, said the chief physician, probably reading her thoughts. – There’s complete chaos there at the moment.

  She knew all about that. But that wasn’t why she had quit. She didn’t mind chaos. As long as she could grab a few hours’ sleep now and then.

  – They’re asking if you wouldn’t mind helping out. Of course, they say they’re not taking it for granted, but there’s no one more capable of dealing with the situation than you.

  She grunted. She had no objection at all to flattery, even if the ulterior motive was as obvious as it was on this occasion.

  – Okay, she said. – I’ll get down there.

  It took her two minutes to find what to wear, another two to put on make-up, three to walk over to the Akershus University Hospital staff entrance. Several police cars were parked there. A uniformed constable guarding the door. Broad shouldered and shaven headed. The former she liked, not too keen on the latter.

  – I’m going to need to see some ID, he said with what sounded like a deliberate attempt to be polite.

  She pulled her ID out of her bag. – I’ve been asked to come down here.

  He glanced at it, then at her, coolly assessing her, then back at the card again before nodding and letting her pass.

  Several policemen in the basement corridor. One of them with a huge dog on a leash. The chief physician appeared through a door. He wasn’t much taller than her, with a halo of hair of indeterminate colour encircling his head and a nose that was much too big for his sharp-boned face.

  – Jennifer, he exclaimed, as though they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. – So happy to have you on board.

  She wasn’t quite sure what he was on about but didn’t bother to ask. He touched her arm and pointed down the corridor. Two policemen there talking to someone sitting on the floor, a young man wearing whites, obviously an employee, looked Turkish or Arabic. He had blood on his face and on his shirt front. As Jennifer passed, he looked up at her, and only then did she realise it was the porter who Zoran had got the job for.

  She stopped and retraced her steps.

  – Are you hurt?

  She’d seen him quite often wheeling beds about but had never exchanged more than a couple of words with him. Zoran said he was an Iranian and that he’d arrived here after a dramatic flight from the ayatollahs.

  The porter moved his lips but didn’t answer her question. Looking into the wide-open eyes, she wondered for a moment if he was insane.

  The chief physician touched her arm again, a polite reminder. Only the exceptional circumstances could justify his constant touching.

  – He’s in shock, naturally, but otherwise unharmed.

  – He was the one who found the body? she asked as they walked on.

  – As far as I know. I’m still not clear about exactly what happened. He’s had a sort of panic attack. A doctor’s going to take a look at him.

  – Why does he have blood on his clothes?

  The chief physician shook his head and showed her through an open door that led into a storage room.

  In one corner there was a huge lamp. Three technicians busy in the harsh light. She recognised one of them, had worked with him during her time as a forensic pathologist.

  – Hi, Jenny. He flipped two fingers to his cap.

  The guy had spent half a year down under and always felt obliged to show her that he’d managed to pick up something that just might pass for an Australian accent.

  – Thought you’d got away with it slipping off into the bush, did you?

  The hospital in Akershus was all of fifteen minutes away from the centre of Oslo, and she gave him a little smile, thinking how one of the things she missed was working with crime-scene technicians on a job. She had always enjoyed the banter.

  – I’ll go and put some work clothes on, she told him.

  He looked her over. She had on a light blue summer frock, but two minutes with a make-up pouch wasn’t enough to work miracles.

  – Don’t disturb anything here until I get back.

  She was shown into an office where she could change. Again she passed the porter sitting on the floor. This time he didn’t look up, just sat there staring straight ahead.

  She pulled on her overalls and cap. Took a last look in the mirror hanging above the sink. Her face still looked like a building site, but as soon as she entered the storage room, she put these useless considerations aside.

  By the far wall, in front of a closet, the twisted body of a man. Powerful upper-body muscles, cropped black hair with bleached highlights. His face was turned to one side; she could see one wide-open eye. He was wearing a black T-shirt and boxer shorts. Blood across the linoleum around him, but not much. She bent down, noted that the shirt was ripped in the belly region, lifted it and saw that there were four stabs wounds and another one directly below the costal arch, this one in an upward direction so that she realised at once the liver had probably been damaged. Carefully she lifted the head with one hand. A crackling sound as the cartilage parted in a gap that went directly across the larynx.

  – We haven’t touched him, said the technician she knew from earlier. – Had to wait for a doctor to make quite sure he’s dead. Not something your average half-witted copper is capable of.

  – You just do your job, you, she grinned back at him. – And let me take care of the patient.

  By the time she let herself out of the pathology lab, it was gone three thirty. Tiredness had caught up with her again, now in the form of a vague heaviness in the region of her sacrum; soon it would be making its way up her through her back. If she hurried, she might get at least a couple of hours before having to start on the autopsy. Every once in a while sleep did in fact manage to break through, like some sneak thief, no matter how much light there was in the room, and that was what she really needed now, to have every last one of her thoughts and concerns stolen.

  As she was about to enter the lift, a voice behind her.

  – Jenny.

  She turned, recognised him at once, even though years had passed since they last met. And even though the years had left their mark on the face she looked up into.

  – Hi, she said, feeling herself blush.

  – Hi, he said, not letting go of the hand s
he had held out in her confusion.

  She pulled herself free. – Are the Oslo police involved in this case?

  – No, just me. Pastures new.

  She remembered now, hearing somewhere that Roar Horvath had gone back home to Lillestrøm.

  – You too, I see. Got a minute?

  – Why not? she murmured, annoyed that she wasn’t able to come up with an excuse.

  She made him instant coffee in a plastic cup back in the office.

  – I hear you’re doing the autopsy.

  She hesitated a few moments. – I’m finished with forensic medicine. I was asked to do this as a favour. And you, she went on, to change the subject. – Detective with the Romerike district police?

  He looked straight at her, smiled quickly. – Section leader, actually.

  She hooked her hair behind her ears; it fell forward again immediately. – A leader who gets up in the middle of the night to visit a crime scene?

  She recalled him as an averagely talented and averagely committed police officer. As something else too, from the times when she had been to his house, even though she had done all she could to forget it.

  – I like to be involved. I see the job a little differently now to how I did before. Something happened a couple of years ago. A friend of mine …

  He moved the coffee cup around in his hand.

  – He died in a fire. Actually, the best friend I ever had. A lot of other things happened too. I ought to have known … Still, that’s the way it goes, there’s a lot we should have known.

  He seemed changed somehow, more serious; she didn’t know if she quite liked it. Had no intention anyway of spending the rest of the night in true confessions and doesn’t life just tear us apart and all that. He was sitting in her office, it was almost four o’clock; she should have asked him to come back during the day, or preferably ring.

  – What happened down there in the basement? she said as she drank her coffee, thin and tepid.

  Roar Horvath scratched his neck. – Swedish citizen, thirty-four years old, admitted to hospital last night. Injuries to his back and head, none of them serious. And then he disappears.

  – Disappears?

  – He vanished before they could get him to his ward. They looked everywhere. Then this porter’s wandering about down in the basement, comes across a trail of blood, opens the closet door and the body falls out on top of him. At least that’s what we’ve got out of him so far.

  Jennifer put her cup aside, more curious than she had the energy for.

  – What the hell sort of story is that?

  Roar Horvath ran his hand through his thin quiff. His widow’s peak was more prominent now than it used to be.

  – You can say that again.

  – You believe his explanation?

  – It’s not really a question of belief.

  Was he being patronising? Suddenly she felt annoyed. Wanted to end the conversation and go home.

  – Do you know him?

  She shook her head. Didn’t know any more than what Zoran had told her. The guy wanted to study medicine. In Zoran’s opinion he was certainly bright enough, if they’d give him the chance.

  The thought of Zoran made her pick up her phone. Maybe have a few minutes with him, if he wasn’t busy in the operating theatre.

  – Apparently he’s been working here for a year, said Roar Horvath. – From Iran. Refugee, apparently.

  Jennifer got up. – Must try and get some sleep before I go back to work.

  – Not a bad idea. You have somewhere here you can get your head down?

  – I live here now. Close by. Been here for a while.

  The lines in Roar Horvath’s brow deepened. To her they still looked like three gulls in flight. – Moved from the farm up there?

  She drained her cup and put it down in a way that was supposed to say they needed to end this conversation now, that from her point of view it had ended, that she had no intention of sitting there in the middle of the night or at any other time discussing her private affairs with Roar Horvath, former detective sergeant attached to the violent-crimes section of the Oslo police. She didn’t want him to know anything at all about what she’d been through over the last few years, about leaving Ivar and the farm, leaving two sons who should’ve been adult enough to understand what she could never explain to them, that it was all over between her and their father and had been for years, that she was leaving him in order to survive. Not because Ivar in any way bothered her, or ever had done; on the contrary, it was all the things he hadn’t done, all the things he wasn’t, that was driving her crazy. In his helpless fashion, all he ever wanted was for her to be happy. As though that made leaving him any easier.

  – I’ll be in touch with the police tomorrow, she said, opening the door.

  – You can call me.

  He handed her a card. She dropped in into her bag without looking at it. – I’ll be doing the autopsy before lunch. You can expect a provisional report sometime in the afternoon.

  – I don’t doubt it. He didn’t take his eyes off her. – You’re one of the best I’ve ever worked with. It’s a pity for forensics you quit.

  Maybe he was being sincere. To avoid having to use the lift with him, she opened a drawer and turned her back, pretended to be looking for something.

  He stood there in the open doorway. – The chief physician would prefer it if we don’t announce the cause of death just yet. No hint at all of what might have happened down there in the basement.

  She turned to him. – Can something like that be kept a secret?

  He smiled in a way she recalled from the days when they worked together. And not just worked together either, she had to correct herself, but that was as far as she would go in conceding what had happened, even in her thoughts.

  – Of course not, he said. – But you know how much trouble there’s been here. Patient security and all that. They’re asking for the weekend to work out the best way to handle it. Fine by us. The longer we get to work in some sort of peace, the better we like it.

  8

  It was the woman who started asking him questions. She was wearing a uniform shirt, with her fair hair gathered at the neck. How long was he away when the bed with the patient disappeared? Was it common for the papers to be left behind at A&E? How was the search conducted? Simple questions, simple answers. She let him speak without interrupting, nodded now and then, and her eyes were friendly. Why had he gone down into the basement alone? What did he think when he saw the trail of blood on the floor, and why hadn’t he called for help? Hard to answer that one, but he managed it. Avoided saying what he knew he mustn’t say, not at any price. That the stairs down to the basement reminded him of the stairs in the prison at Evin, that he couldn’t shake the thought that the patient in the bed resembled one of the guards, someone whose name he didn’t want to remember, someone he’d tried to remove every trace of from his thoughts but who nevertheless appeared in his nightmares, sometimes in broad daylight too, in visions, and then suddenly in a hospital bed. Because it was the guard lying there, but at the same time not him, and he couldn’t reveal any of this.

  You’ll be all right, Arash.

  He said that inside himself, over and over again, until the words came from someone else, someone who had helped him before.

  In the car on the way down to the police station, he hadn’t managed to say anything. Not even when they took him into this room. Only when the woman in the light blue shirt came in was he able to speak. He felt as though this woman wished him well.

  But when the other one started asking questions, things changed again. This policeman was wearing a leather jacket with a white T-shirt below it; he had a moustache, and a fringe that accentuated the egg-like shape of his head. His eyes were grey-blue and slightly protruding. Just now and then, certain things about him seemed to resemble the patient. The look in Ibro Hakanovic’s eyes as he lay in the bed talking to him. Arash drove the images away, forced himself to return to the
place where he actually was, an interrogation room in the police station in Lillestrøm, a room painted grey and white, no windows, no pictures on the walls. They’d said they wanted him there for a conversation. When the man in the leather jacket started asking questions, it wasn’t a conversation any more but an interrogation, because he gave nothing in return. Sat in his chair with an expressionless face and noted down his answers. And then the questioning took another direction. Who were his contacts in Norway? Did he move in Iranian circles? How long had he been in the country? When he answered three and a half years, the woman interjected that he spoke unusually good Norwegian for someone who’d been there such a short time. He turned to her in gratitude, and perhaps her face coloured a little when he looked at her. He wished she could have been there alone with him.

  But it was still the man with the bulging eyes who was asking the questions. He had introduced himself, and Arash knew quite well what his name was but avoided thinking about him as anything other than a policeman. The woman’s name was Ina Sundal. He held on to that.

  – You came here as a refugee three and a half years ago, said the policeman. – You claim that you travelled via Turkey and Germany.

  Arash felt himself nod. He had retraced the route of his flight many times when waking up in the middle of the night. The mountain pass in the winter darkness. The group of fifteen approaching the border step by step. Their guide had been given most of his money before they started and they didn’t know whether they could trust him. He was a Kurd, and if he betrayed them he would be paid a lot more money than they would ever be able to afford. Besides his own rucksack, Arash was carrying the pack belonging to the oldest man in the group, a seventy year old who could hardly breathe in the blizzard.

  – Why did you come to Norway?

  He glanced across at Ina Sundal.

  – Nothing happens by chance, he said to her.

  – I see, said the policeman.

  – I could have stayed in Germany. But a friend I made in Frankfurt knew someone in Norway who could help me. A hospital doctor.