by Gard Sveen
It was empty and gray before him. The bare concrete walls and damp air made the room feel like a dungeon. Or an isolation ward. He would feel more confident now if he’d managed to get Rask back into isolation. But that wasn’t an option. He didn’t want to lose his job, even if he would soon retire.
At the end of the room was the door out to the garden. An old door without a deadbolt. Who needed that out here in the country?
He put his hand on the doorknob.
Just as he was about to check whether it was locked, he heard the knocking sounds somewhere behind him.
One, two, three.
Farther away now.
He knew where it came from. The fiendish black furnace room.
Goose bumps rose on his arms like on a freshly plucked chicken.
Someone must be in there.
“Damn,” he said.
He pulled on the door.
It was locked.
Or was it? The old door was sluggish, he knew that. He took firm hold of the doorknob and leaned against the door with all his strength.
It was still locked.
But whoever was knocking on the pipes had gotten in here somehow. The door must have been open earlier in the day, while he was at work. Then the person had locked it behind him.
He took his phone out of his pocket and entered the number to Ringvoll.
“Yes?” said the nurse on duty.
“I dialed the wrong number” was all he said. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him. He thought he’d managed to maintain a normal tone of voice.
No, he thought when the pipes started up again. Now I’m going to get you, damn it. He walked quickly back through the laundry room without locking the door behind him. The light in the TV room almost blinded him when he turned it on. He grabbed the poker beside the fireplace and almost ran toward the steel door at the end of the room.
Steps, he thought. Steps.
He turned around slowly.
“What are you doing?” said his wife. She had slippers on and her old bathrobe loosely tied around her waist.
There was the pounding in the pipes again. Furuberget gestured with his head.
“I’ll call the service tomorrow. It’s just the furnace, Arne.”
He nodded.
She took a few steps toward him. He recoiled instinctively, as if he didn’t trust that she was who she claimed to be.
“What’s been going on?”
“Nothing.”
He was about to say something, something reassuring, but the sound of the phone upstairs caused him to drop the poker.
“Edle Maria is alive,” he said. “She’s alive.”
His wife shook her head.
The phone stopped ringing.
He frowned. He wanted to tell her, Do not open the door for anyone until Christmas, not anyone, but not a word came out of his mouth.
33
Bergmann was perfectly fine with the fact that he would probably never figure out Susanne Bech. He wasn’t sure whether he would keep her on or not, given the chance.
“Son of a bitch,” he said when the census registry’s server returned his search on Gunnar Austbø. He was registered as having emigrated to Spain in 1998. And I won’t get any further than that, thought Bergmann. For Austbø evidently had no family either. He was just an eccentric old bachelor who hadn’t wanted to take care of Kristiane’s friends that Sunday evening back in 1988.
He considered calling Jon-Olav Farberg to ask him to contact some of his old colleagues, who might know where in Spain Austbø was, but he quickly rejected that. Instead he jotted down a brief note summarizing the conversation he’d had with Farberg, and sent it to Susanne with a message about filing it with the case, if there was a new case, that is.
“Overview,” he said to himself, “I need an overview.” There was only one place to begin, and that was at the top of the last folder in the mountain of papers Susanne had put on his desk.
After reading for an hour or two, he copied the forensic psychiatrist’s report from Anders Rask’s trial. He put it in an envelope, which he placed in his outbox along with a note explaining that it should be sent by courier to Rune Flatanger in Kripo’s profiling group. Inside the envelope he’d included a Post-it note with a message to Flatanger telling him to read the report as soon as possible. Bergmann had an ambivalent relationship with Flatanger, mostly because he felt that Flatanger read him like an open book. To be honest, he had never liked him. Actually he didn’t like psychologists in general. But Rune Flatanger was the most capable one he’d worked with up there, and he needed all the help he could get.
When he got home, he stopped halfway up the steps to his apartment.
Sounds, he thought. From below. Sometimes his hearing was too good for his own sanity. Scratching, wasn’t it? He went back down to the mailboxes by the entry door and then continued slowly down the basement stairs. He remained standing outside the door to the basement storage compartments for some time. When the entry door opened above him, he hid under the stairs. At first he wasn’t able to hear whether the cautious steps above him were on their way down to the basement or headed upstairs.
Up, he thought.
When the sounds of the boots of the person on the stairs had died away, he took out his keys and unlocked the basement door. For a while he stood there, swaying on the threshold. Then he took a tentative step into the big, dark, damp-smelling room. The door closed heavily behind him, and the latch clicked. The stuffy, raw air surrounded him. He felt along the rough brick wall until he found the light switch. He waited.
Someone or something was breathing in there.
A pair of eyes, down by the floor, glistened in the weak glow from the streetlights that filtered through the narrow windows.
He pushed on the light switch and jumped slightly when a black-and-white cat meowed and squeezed into the corner by the farthest compartment. A flood of relief washed over him; unconsciously, he had been thinking it was something quite different than a cat. A moment later, he wondered whether he was losing his grip on reality.
He took a step toward the cat, which scurried in the opposite direction.
“Come here,” he said in what he imagined was an inviting tone. He crouched down slowly and reached his arm out toward the cat. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t be down here all night.”
Suddenly, the door behind him was pulled open.
He lost his balance as he tried to get up, and his knee struck the concrete floor. He rose in one movement and spun around.
Whoever had opened the door had still not entered the basement.
His breaths grew uncontrollably rapid and shallow. One thought passed through his head: he had turned off the TV before falling asleep last night. He glanced around the room. Right below one window was a snow shovel and a sharp folding spade. With a few steps he would be able to reach the spade.
The person reached around the door frame.
“Oh, it’s you?”
Bergmann exhaled heavily. Good Lord, he thought. This can’t go on.
The old woman who lived on the fourth floor—what was her name again? Ingebrigtsen—stepped into the room.
“I’m starting to go batty,” she said, shaking her head. The cat bounded over to her and rubbed up against her legs.
“So you got yourself a cat? That’s nice.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Ever since Trygve died, there aren’t as many people to talk to.”
He remembered the night the ambulance had come to get her husband.
Mrs. Ingebrigtsen sighed.
“I think I forgot him down here,” she said, more to herself than to Bergmann.
“I heard him, and—”
“It’s comforting to have a policeman in the building,” she said, and smiled weakly. “At least I think so.”
“It’s nice that you think so.”
“But it’s too bad it doesn’t do us much good down here.”
He held her gaze.
“What do you mean?”
She nodded at a spot behind him.
He turned around.
She went past him with the cat in her arms.
“That’s your compartment, isn’t it?” she asked.
He followed her, almost reluctantly.
The padlock was cut off.
He closed his eyes.
“It was simpler when we just had coal down here,” she said quietly. “And people understood the difference between mine and yours.”
As he walked up to his apartment, he told himself that these were just coincidences. Someone had just been rooting around in there, even though there was little of interest, mostly empty fruit boxes and old clothes, some schoolbooks he didn’t know why he’d kept, and some textbooks from his Police Academy days. It’s just coincidence, nothing else. One of the sons of a single mother on the third floor was a junkie; it was surely him or one of his buddies with a key who’d broken in. They were dumb enough to try a break-in in their own building, even dumb enough to break into a compartment they knew belonged to a policeman, because that was the only one they hadn’t broken into before. He would have a stern talk with the boy next time he saw him hanging around here.
Nonetheless, even though he’d managed to convince himself that these were all coincidences, he had a look around his apartment before he went to bed. He opened all the cupboards and drawers, looked over the bookshelves, studied the photographs, even took a look in the refrigerator.
He opened the refrigerator door slowly, as though expecting to find something repulsive in there. Idiot, he thought at the sight of old sandwich fixings and a milk carton he should have emptied and thrown out long ago.
But the feeling didn’t go away.
Something was wrong.
Something in the apartment was different, but what was it?
After an hour of lying in bed with his eyes wide open, he got up and rooted around in the medicine cabinet. At last he found a box of valium that Hege had left behind. He took a tablet without checking the expiration date on the box and rinsed it down with water from the tap. The alcohol was probably out of his body now. Mixing benzodiazepines and alcohol was the last thing he wanted to do.
Maybe he would wake up in time to drive up to Toten tomorrow. Maybe not.
He didn’t know if a meeting with Anders Rask was what he needed now.
34
Ringvoll might look like an idyllic place, if you overlooked the property’s fence, which resembled that of a concentration camp. The snow-covered fields outside the fence sloped gently down toward Mjøsa, and the sky was reflected in the ice on the lake. The facility’s entrance, however, could have been taken straight from Treblinka. Bergmann rang the doorbell and pulled the collar of his jacket all the way up. The valium tablet from the night before should be out of his bloodstream in just a few hours. Although the sluggish, confused perception of reality that came with benzodiazepines always depressed him—and he would soon be standing face-to-face with Anders Rask—he felt lighter in spirit for a moment.
He stopped on the gravel path that led to the main building. The rope struck against the nearby flagpole—as if this was a place to fly the flag. Beside the long yellow main building were two lower buildings more recently built, with glass tunnels that connected them with the main building.
It wouldn’t be impossible to escape from here, he thought, ringing yet another doorbell. He turned around on the broad granite steps. The fence was of sturdy mesh, but not insurmountable. If you just had a good pair of wire cutters and a car on the outside, it could theoretically be done. The fence was hardly electrified. But maybe there was another reason that those who were confined here didn’t need higher security. They probably had enough to do maintaining order in their own heads without hatching an escape plan too. And where would they get wire cutters?
He showed his police ID to the Securitas man, who sat safely protected behind thick Plexiglas in the guardhouse. He slipped Bergmann a sticker with the letter B on it through the transaction drawer. While he waited to be picked up, he went through some of the questions he intended to ask Rask, but was still unsure how to approach the matter at hand. Frankly, he was also somewhat unsure why he was even here. But what else could he do? He had six days to present something concrete to Finneland.
A sturdy young man with a mild but direct gaze and firm handshake came to pick him up. Solid, thought Bergmann. But his first question destroyed the positive impression.
“Are you the one who’s here to talk to Anders?”
Anders, he thought. That sounded too familiar, as if Anders Rask was a person on the same level with everyone else. Bergmann tried to ignore the fact that Rask had killed the six girls. He had to try to see the whole thing from a different angle, like Frank Krokhol. An abuser, but not a killer.
He was shown into a large office adjacent to the nurses’ station that had a magnificent view of the country’s biggest freshwater lake. Bergmann barely registered the door plaque: “Consultant Physician Arne Furuberget.”
The man who received him waved lightly toward the nurse, as if he wanted him out as quickly as possible. Bergmann was surprised when he realized that the man before him was actually Furuberget himself. Yesterday on the phone he’d imagined someone younger, perhaps around his own age, but he turned out to be a great deal older than that. The office décor also suggested that Furuberget was a man from another era. The old hardwood desk and large naturalistic paintings would have been more appropriate back in the late nineteenth century. He even had an inkwell on the desk, two pen points, and a stack of thick stationery on the dark-leather blotter. Only a slender computer screen broke the impression that he’d stumbled into the Victorian era.
Furuberget gestured toward a leather sofa, though he himself remained standing. Bergmann imagined that this was deliberate. Furuberget placed himself in front of the window; the sunlight meant that Bergmann could see little other than his silhouette.
“I think he’s going to be acquitted for the murder of Kristiane Thorstensen,” Bergmann began, getting right down to business. “That means that the killer is still running loose. If Anders Rask is not wrongly acquitted, that is. If he’s acquitted of all the murders, you have a very unpleasant case on your hands. He who is forewarned, is also forearmed, wasn’t that what the Romans said back in the day?”
No response from Furuberget.
“I understand that you’ve spoken with Rune Flatanger about the Daina murder?” Bergmann asked.
Furuberget nodded and assumed a serious expression.
“Then I’m sure you understand why I’m here.”
“I won’t take a position on the question of guilt until there is a new judgment. Police work is not my domain.” Furuberget averted his gaze and observed his hands.
“How many visitors does he have?” said Bergmann.
“None to speak of. He doesn’t want anything to do with his family. They don’t want anything to do with him.”
“But he has had other visitors?”
“The first year.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t remember.”
“If he hasn’t had any visitors since then, you probably remember who it was?”
“Bergmann, I have thirty patients on the security ward and fifty on the open ward. This is factory work. I can’t remember such things, I’m sorry.”
“Visitor lists?”
Furuberget shook his head.
“That’s not the sort of thing we keep.”
“But it must be in his patient record who visited him?”
Furuberget exhaled heavily.
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
There was a pause. Furuberget went to his desk, picked up a cloth, and started cleaning his glasses.
“What—” Bergmann began.
“It’s good you came alone, as I asked you to. Rask gets easily destabilized in situations where he feels pressured. The majority of those with psychoses do.”
<
br /> “So he’s still psychotic?”
Furuberget did not answer the question.
“What do you mean? Is he just as sick as when he was convicted?”
Furuberget studied the lenses of his glasses carefully. Apparently satisfied he put them back on.
“More or less equally sick or equally healthy, depending on how you look at it. At times he can appear sparklingly lucid and healthier than you or me. Just between us: the problem is that it may be all an act. He is actually capable of suppressing what we might call his other self for long periods and function well, even socially, during those times. He is also extremely intelligent. But unfortunately the Devil himself may rest just beneath the surface. A science that attempts to capture the human mind will never be exact, Bergmann, it is too labyrinthine for that. I can safely say that Rask’s head greatly resembles the labyrinth on Knossos. Who knows if there is any way out? Do you understand?”
Bergmann frowned.
“Once you’ve worked your way into that type of madness, it’s impossible to get out again.”
“So he’ll never be released, even if he’s acquitted of all the murders?”
Furuberget looked at him seriously, then broke into a little smile.
“Not as long as I’m the decision-maker here. But my power is limited. If he’s acquitted of all the murders, it will be difficult, maybe impossible, to keep him here on the ward. Besides, I’m retiring soon. Perhaps others will assess Anders differently.”
The nurse came back in.
“Then you’re ready?” said Furuberget.
The nurse nodded.
Bergmann stood up.
“You’re not coming with?”
Furuberget shook his head with a half-resigned smile.
“I’m afraid it will only seem provoking to him. You might say I’m not a favorite of his. On the other hand, he’ll probably appreciate you.”
“Really?”
“I’ve seldom seen him so exhilarated as yesterday. Perhaps he sees this as his big chance, what do I know?”
Bergmann stopped on his way out the door to the corridor.
“What if he did it anyway? Didn’t you say that he can appear healthy for long periods?”
