by Gard Sveen
Ole-Martin Gustavsen had worked at Ringvoll for twenty years and knew when to keep his mouth shut.
A young temporary nurse followed Furuberget over to the first door. Furuberget would have preferred to go alone, but that was such an obvious breach of conduct that it couldn’t be done. The temp was tall and sturdy, which gave Furuberget a kind of comfort. Over the course of his long career in psychiatry, his life had been threatened more than once. He had simply dismissed those moments at the time, but that was back when the employees were always in a clear majority in relation to the patients. Budget cuts now forced them to operate right on the edge of what was safe. They only had funds for two employees along with one patient in the security ward. Furuberget knew that was on the edge of what he could permit, but what could he do? Neither he, nor the country’s politicians, wanted uniformed guards patrolling the hospital, but sufficient funding for a safe workplace didn’t seem to be a priority either. Soon there would probably be no money for self-defense training for new hires either.
Furuberget held his access card up to the optical scanner beside the door and entered the four-digit code. The two manual locks in the steel door then had to be unlocked within the next thirty seconds. Though he had his own set of keys, he let the nurse do the unlocking.
The temp held the door open, and Furuberget stepped into the camera-monitored passage. Once the outer door had closed behind them, the nurse relocked the two manual locks. Two yards ahead of them was another steel door, which could not be unlocked unless the first one was locked. Only a switch inside the nurses’ office could unlock both doors at the same time.
Only, thought Furuberget. Occasionally he thought that the inconceivable might happen. That someone in there could press just that button. All the security ward’s employees underwent a thorough background check, one that was even more rigorous than the patients’ if that were possible.
It would never happen.
The corridor beyond the last door was empty. The room at the far end on the left was Anders Rask’s, on the side of the building that faced away from Lake Mjøsa. Every quarter, Rask applied to change rooms for one with a view of the lake, but Furuberget rejected his bid every time. Fortunately he could use psychiatry as an excuse—it would be upsetting for the four patients with rooms facing Mjøsa to give up theirs—but Rask evidently knew that was a lie.
That was the way Rask was. He had never brought up the issue directly with Furuberget, only in the form of a letter through his attorney. But Furuberget felt sure that the room meant nothing to Rask; it was only a pretext to torment him. The big problem was that for several years now Rask had not fulfilled the criteria to even be housed in the security ward. He had been sentenced to psychiatric treatment because, according to the legal expert, he was psychotic when he committed the murders. But now, in 2004, there was little or nothing that indicated that he was. In theory he could have been transferred to an open ward on the basis of his exemplary conduct. It was only gut instinct that prevented Furuberget from accommodating Rask’s wish to leave the secure ward for good. Some days, Furuberget suspected Rask of being the most calculating psychopath he had ever been exposed to, but he was reasonably sure that Rask’s controlled facade would crack eventually. And if it cracked after Rask had been transferred to an open ward, the consequences would be insurmountable. If Rask were acquitted of Kristiane’s murder, it would be even more difficult for him to prevent transfer to an open ward. And once he was on an open ward, he would be permitted to take leave. And if that happened, Furuberget knew that Rask would never return to Ringvoll again.
The corridor had just been mopped and smelled strongly of cleanser. The odor made Furuberget feel briefly nauseated. He opened the hatch in the door. A shiny plastic mirror was mounted up in the left corner, so that he could see the bed and steel toilet. Furuberget checked his watch. Three hours ought to be more than enough.
“I’ll call when I’m done,” he said to the temp. The door buzzed behind him, and the electronic strike fell into place, the little piece of metal that protected the world against Rask. Or maybe it was the other way around.
He went straight over to the wall-mounted bookshelf with rounded corners, which was filled with books on the top two shelves. It was rather paradoxical. The whole room was furnished so that there were no breakable or sharp objects. But the paper in the old Cappelen reference book was so sharp that Rask could have cut himself with it if he chose to. Furuberget had nonetheless let him keep both the reference book and the other books. Anders Rask was narcissistic enough that he would never kill or injure himself.
And now I’m going to find your damned letter, thought Furuberget.
He picked up a bundle of papers off the shelf and started rifling through them.
The letter wasn’t there.
He paged meticulously through the folder where Rask kept his correspondence, neatly ordered by date. There’s just as much craziness outside these walls as there is inside, thought Furuberget. Rask was convicted of the bestial murders of defenseless girls, and women were lining up to marry him.
He picked up the printout of the mail log that he’d brought with him and compared the letters and dates.
“No,” he whispered.
The letter wasn’t in there with the others. There could only be one reason why. Rask predicted this, thought Furuberget. Predicted that a new murder would take place. Maybe even initiated the whole thing by giving his attorney the message about wanting to reopen the Kristiane case. And he knew that Furuberget would be sitting like this, in his room, holding all his letters in his hand.
“That son of a bitch,” Furuberget whispered to himself.
He took out the little notebook he kept in his pocket. He spent the next half hour drawing a sketch of the bookcase, the placement of the books, and the binders. Then he started tearing all the books out of the bookcase.
Now it was too late to turn back. He leafed through the pages of the roughly forty books—twice.
Nothing.
He picked up the first volume of Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry and started to go through it again. Rask had a small library of psychiatric literature, all purchased with taxpayers’ money. Furuberget often thought that it was only the physical, legitimized force and medications he prescribed to people like Anders Rask that gave him any advantage. If anything, Rask had better prerequisites for talking about psychiatry than he did.
He scanned the room. There weren’t many other places he could have put the letter. He assured himself that the control light in the camera up on the wall was not shining red. Then he removed the bed linens, which were caked with Rask’s sperm. He shuddered, but forged ahead.
The letter was nowhere, not in the pillowcase, not under the sheets.
He calculated how much time he had until lunch and decided he could just manage to take the stuffing out of the mattress. Once he started pulling the cover off the mattress, he thought about giving up. It was almost solidly attached.
And when he’d got the light-blue material off completely and absorbed the disappointment that the letter wasn’t there either, he realized that he didn’t have time to put the mattress cover back on again.
Time, he thought, looking at the mess on the floor. Rask can’t find me like this. How long would it take to get that mattress put back together?
He let the cover be and decided to turn the bed on its side. It was made of metal, but the legs were hollow. After several minutes he managed to get the rubber stopper off the bottom of one bedpost.
He went over to the call button by the door. He wanted to call the guard, but stopped himself. Instead he went over to the chest of drawers and took out a bundle of clothes, freshly ironed from the laundry. Nearly identical checked shirts, underwear, and socks.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing!” Then he picked up Rask’s crazy clipping book. He had ordered copies from the National Library of all the newspaper articles about the six murders he was convicted
of. Though he had thrown away a few of them, he had neatly pasted the rest into a big binder, the kind that Furuberget’s daughters had used for school when they were small.
Someone pounded on the door. Furuberget’s heart nearly stopped and he sat as if petrified with a thick red volume, The Book of the Law, in his hands. The book—which Rask had referred to several times in the past few years as his Bible—was written by a man who was, if possible, even more disturbed than Rask himself, an Englishman by the name of Aleister Crowley. Rask had often mentioned the book’s opening line—“This book explains the universe”—to Furuberget, who, being neither an occultist nor sexually deviant, had refused to read it.
Only now did he notice the sweat under his suit, how it was trickling down from his scalp. A drop of perspiration fell onto the blood-red front cover and left a dark stain.
Medusa.
Hadn’t there been something similar in that letter? Medusa’s tears?
He took another book from the shelf and tried to leaf through it, but his fingers would not obey.
“Is everything okay?” The temp’s voice sounded cold and surreal through the loudspeaker.
“Yes,” said Furuberget.
“I just wanted to remind you that lunch starts in ten minutes.”
“I need you to help me,” Furuberget said quietly. He lowered his head, as if he were standing before an executioner who was waiting for him to expose his neck.
The door buzzed.
The temp’s eyes widened.
Ten to twelve, thought Furuberget.
Maybe Rask wasn’t hungry that day. Maybe he didn’t feel like sitting and lecturing one of the three other inmates he was allowed to eat with.
“No questions. You’ve never seen this, okay?”
“Okay.”
“What was your name again?”
“Fredriksen.”
Not very imaginative, thought Furuberget. He decided at once not to renew his contract.
“We have to work quickly. I’m searching for a letter, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.” He tried to smile at the temp, but only felt himself grow even more desperate—another step closer to being a helpless old fool.
After restoring order and getting the cover back on the mattress with Fredriksen’s help, he took one last look around. The room appeared to be the way it had been when he arrived.
“Not a word, Fredriksen,” he said as they were in the process of letting themselves out.
Fredriksen held his gaze longer than normal.
“What is it about that letter?”
“Nothing.”
The young temp laughed quietly, which only confirmed Furuberget’s decision to let him go.
At home that evening he was in no mood to talk.
“I want to go away for Christmas,” his wife said, picking at her meal. Furuberget ate with mechanical movements, as if he was forcing the food down.
“Did you hear what I said, Arne?”
He was trying to remember the text of the letter, but realized that he had to give up. At some point, you just have to let go—wasn’t that what he was always telling his patients? Not the sickest ones, of course, but those who might have a tiny hope of one day returning to normal life.
“Christmas,” he said. “You want to go away.”
“Surprise me.” She smiled in a way that reminded him why he’d fallen for her once upon a time.
His wife went to bed early, at nine o’clock. Furuberget stayed up and listened to Tchaikovsky. After two glasses of whiskey he was so sentimental that he started to cry. He thought about his daughters. Grown now, and then some, with children of their own, but to him, they would always be little. Then he thought about the young girl on Frognerveien, and about Kristiane Thorstensen. The five others.
“I mustn’t make a mistake.” He tightened his grip around the crystal glass, squeezing so hard that it almost cracked.
He fell asleep sometime toward morning, after having booked a two-week vacation to Langkawi in Malaysia. It cost an arm and a leg, but she would definitely be surprised. Although he felt determined not to let Rask win, he knew he must simply let this be.
Let it go, even if it would cost several lives. Although Pontius Pilate had hardly lived a good life, he had at least survived.
When he got in the car in the morning to drive to Ringvoll, he sensed there was more snow on the way.
“I’m just imagining things,” he said to himself.
Few exercises were so pathetic as self-deception.
Anders Rask was a pedantic. He never would have hidden the letter—much less torn it to pieces and flushed it down the toilet at night—if he didn’t have a good reason for it. A very good reason.
12
Bergmann took his eyes off the screen. He didn’t know how many times they’d run the surveillance-camera footage. They could sit like that until Christmas without getting any closer to the answer. All they had were the images of a man walking from Porte des Senses up Cort Adelers Gate toward Drammensveien at 1:59 a.m. the same night the girl was almost murdered.
Or was murdered, thought Bergmann.
She was dead. She had died right before his eyes. And all they had were twenty seconds of film of a man whose face was completely hidden by a cap. And he could simply be a man on his way home. Though his actions may not have been completely innocent, it was entirely possible that he wasn’t a killer.
Milovic, the owner of Porte des Senses, would not be linked to the young girl who was killed. Not even a verbal agreement with the chief public prosecutor could do anything about that. Milovic had stuck his neck out far enough as it was.
They hadn’t gotten a single credible tip about the man in the cap. Just the usual doomsday prophets calling and talking nonsense. The only ones who could possibly recognize him must have been at Porte des Senses themselves. And they likely preferred to keep their mouths shut rather than admit that they’d been at an illegal club and spent the night doing things they shouldn’t.
In a declamatory voice, as if he’d already given up, Reuter went through the case one more time. Times, places, interviews with neighbors. Repetition for the sake of repetition. They wouldn’t get much further until they discovered the girl’s identity.
Bergmann met the gaze of Susanne Bech, who sat across the table from him. She’d been watching the prosecutor, Svein Finneland, almost the entire time, with a strange expression on her face, as though she was struggling with her emotions but trying to act indifferent. She lowered her sad eyes and scribbled something on her notepad, then picked up her phone and stared at it for a long time, as if she’d received a text message she didn’t understand. He speculated that she’d quarreled with her ex-husband, and that he’d struck a sore spot.
“What was it the girl said again, Tommy?”
“What?” said Bergmann.
Reuter pointed at him from his seat up by the screen. “Maria?”
“Yes, Maria.”
“Nothing else?”
“Yes, one word. But it was impossible to understand. In another language, maybe Lithuanian, I don’t know.”
“Maria,” Reuter said to himself. “We’ll figure out what language she was speaking later today.”
Bergmann pressed the “Play” button on the Dictaphone he had sitting in front of him.
The room was completely quiet for a few seconds. Then they heard some voices in the background, followed by the girl, mumbling quietly to herself, after which she said, “Maria.”
And then the sudden scream.
Bergmann closed his eyes. He felt like he was being thrown against the wall again.
“Maria!”
The girl’s voice seemed to frighten the whole gathering. She screamed as if she’d seen the Devil himself.
Reuter propped his chin in his hands and stared down at the table. He shook his head slightly.
Hanne Rodahl, the police chief, fiddled with her reading glasses. Bergmann saw that she was mouthing the word “Maria” to he
rself. Halgeir Sørvaag looked as if he’d just woken up. He should be awake, since he was responsible for the investigation. He whispered something in the police chief’s ear. She frowned.
“What are you two whispering about?” said Finneland. He was in an even worse mood than he’d been earlier that day. He had taken a chance by making a deal with Milovic, and now it seemed to have led nowhere. Anders Rask had gotten the case reopened, and they had a new homicide on their hands. It could hardly get much worse for Finneland, a man with ambitions to take over the world if he got the opportunity.
“Rewind,” said Sørvaag.
“Why?” said Reuter.
Bergmann picked up the Dictaphone and stopped it. The doctor’s curt commands died away.
“Rewind. To before she says ‘Maria,’” said Sørvaag.
Bergmann rewound.
The girl mumbled a word, but Bergmann couldn’t decipher it.
“What is she saying?” said Finneland.
“Hush,” said Sørvaag, holding up his hand. He grabbed the Dictaphone and rewound it again.
The room grew even quieter than before as the recording was played again. Two words, perhaps the same one repeated. Then “Maria,” and finally the scream: “Maria!”
Sørvaag stopped the recording.
“Edle,” he said. “I think that’s what she’s saying. Or am I the only one who’s hearing that?”
“Maybe so,” said Reuter. “I don’t hear it. I don’t even think the Criminal Police will get anything out of that recording, but God knows.”
“It’s just that I’ve heard that name, Edle Maria, some place,” said Sørvaag.
“She doesn’t say anything before ‘Maria,’” said Finneland. He breathed demonstratively out of his nose. “In any event nothing I can make out.”
“I think she just says ‘Maria.’ Or do you think it’s possible she means ‘Ave Maria’?” said Reuter. “Jesus came out between the legs of a skinny little Jewish girl by that name, Halgeir. May be her mother or sister for all we know.”
Finneland opened his mouth to say something, but evidently changed his mind.
