by Gard Sveen
“If he pulls himself together in court every single time and the evidence is as paltry as it once was, then he’ll be acquitted of all the murders. If, as you ask, he did it anyway, well, then he’s obviously going to kill again once he’s let out. It’ll only be a question of time.”
Bergmann exhaled heavily out his nose, making him sound more resigned than he was.
“But don’t worry about that,” said Furuberget. “Anders Rask will be inside these walls until he dies.”
Let’s hope so, thought Bergmann.
“What do you think? Did he do it?”
“Fortunately it’s not my job to determine that.”
Bergmann took his hand.
“No, then I guess you’d be in my shoes.”
Furuberget let out a quiet, boyish laugh.
“Thanks for the chat, and please keep me posted. I have meetings the rest of the day, but call me, Bergmann, tomorrow perhaps?”
Furuberget remained standing in a strange position. He held his right arm up, his index finger halfway up in the air, like an old schoolmaster who had a thought on the tip of his tongue.
“Is there anything else I need to know?” said Bergmann.
Furuberget lowered his arm and shook his head.
35
Bergmann followed the nurse through a passage with double doors, which made him dismiss any thoughts of escape. On their way down the first-floor corridor, they passed through two more zones with locked steel doors. First access card with code, then keys. The nurse carried a walkie-talkie, and a pager and a small leather bag on his belt. Bergmann guessed it contained a set of straps.
When they arrived at the end of the corridor, they passed a patient accompanied by two nurses. As Bergmann met the patient’s gaze, goose bumps formed on his arms and along his hairline. There was something strangely familiar about the wildly wavering gaze.
A modern-looking grate covered the window on the far wall. Bergmann took hold of the metal bars and tried to concentrate on the view of Mjøsa. A series of images flashed before his eyes: a man lying on the floor in a corridor like this, in a fetal position, screaming, like an animal, a wounded animal, white clogs clattering, a cup falling to the floor. He himself alone, abandoned.
He turned and watched the patient and the two nurses. They had stopped a little farther down the corridor; something seemed to be bothering the patient, who was now rocking back and forth on the bottle-green linoleum floor.
Impossible, he thought, observing the confused patient. A muffled scream came from one of the patient rooms.
He closed his eyes.
The images became clearer.
Fragments of another dialect, that cup falling to the floor—he remembered it now. The design on the cup, the coffee spilling across the floor, splashing on his thigh, his mother’s relaxed dialect, the northern accent she was never able to drop entirely, which emerged whenever she was really angry. A man lying on a floor like this, in a corridor like this.
When he opened his eyes, the patient and the two nurses had left. They must have gone through the doors to the next zone in the ward.
“Are you coming?” said the nurse who was accompanying him. He stood on the landing up to the second floor with an inquisitive look on his face.
Bergmann nodded.
“So he’s not in isolation?” he said.
“No, Anders has a room on the second floor,” the nurse said.
Then a loud scream was heard from the first floor. The sound of a door being opened. The scream carried up the stairwell, its echo amplified by the brick walls.
The nurse’s walkie-talkie crackled, and the pager on his belt beeped. He stopped entering the code on the door to the second floor and disappeared down the stairs.
“I’ll be back,” he called out over the sound of the bestial screams.
The screams were draining Bergmann of the last of his energy. He had a memory of a hand stroking his cheek. Soft, warm, a woman’s? Or a man’s? He didn’t remember. Only the words: “Everything will be fine, my dear. Everything will be fine.”
He went back down the stairs to the window on the first floor. He took hold of the metal grate in front of the window once again, let his gaze follow the snow-covered earth down toward Mjøsa.
The question was clear: Have I been here before?
36
He was shown into a visitor’s room on the second floor. The room was on the west side of the building and had a view of a forested area that rose evenly up the hillside. The memories that had flashed across his mind’s eye had faded. He was close to telling himself that it was only a dream, a few scattered glass shards of a fantasy that came out of nowhere.
Apart from the grate in front of the windows, the camera affixed to the ceiling, and the signal bell by the door, the room mostly reminded him of an old teachers’ lounge. The pine furniture was covered in rough orange fabric, and woodcuts in soft colors in simple white wood frames hung on the pale-green walls. Bergmann imagined that the patients had made the pictures. He touched the glass on one picture as if to assure himself that it was unbreakable Plexiglas. The picture was rather skillfully executed, with grazing horses in a summer meadow and a stoop-shouldered man leaning over a hay-drying rack.
He could just make out the signature: A. R.
The door beside him opened.
The same inscrutable sneer.
The man stood motionless in the doorway. It looked as though the sight of Bergmann reminded him of something. Though his gaze was vacant, his mouth showed a sign of life.
Two nurses followed him closely, the one who had first accompanied him and a tall, ungainly fellow. It seemed unnecessary based on Rask’s appearance. He hardly looked capable of defending himself if he were attacked. Besides, he had never been violent to anyone other than defenseless girls. On the other hand the violence he was convicted of was so inhumanly brutal that if Bergmann were the head of this hospital, he would never have left Rask alone with anyone.
Anders Rask looked far older than Bergmann remembered from the documentary and the pictures in the newspaper. The years up here had evidently taken their toll. Even his strikingly feminine facial features appeared to have faded after almost eleven years in the ward. He was dressed in an old wool sweater with harlequin patterns across the chest, a pair of worn corduroy pants, and a pair of bright-red Crocs on his feet, no socks. Bergmann tried to imagine Rask as the man he’d once been, a man who had easily gotten the girls at the school to admire him, getting the most impressionable of them to fall in love with him and the most daring to visit him at home, a man so shrewd that he didn’t lay a hand on any girls other than those he knew with 100 percent certainty that he could control. Apart from the one girl at Bryn School who dared go to her mother and reveal what Rask was really up to at his place. Or in the cabin at Magnor. The mere thought that he had convinced an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl to go out there with him was enough to make Bergmann think that Rask deserved to rot in a place like this. He did not even want to think about what he would have been capable of doing to Rask if he’d had the chance.
“So do you like the picture?” said Rask, keeping his gaze fixed on a point outside the window. Something up in the forest-clad hillside seemed to occupy all his attention.
“You’re a lot more talented than I am, that’s for sure,” said Bergmann, letting his finger follow some of the lines in the woodcut. “I’ve only tried linoleum and potato cuts.”
Rask let out a strange, snickering laugh.
A middle-aged man in a suit with no tie came limping up to the doorway. He introduced himself as the attorney Gundersen, a trustworthy-sounding name, from the law firm of Gjøvik, Gundersen, Harboe & Co. So it was this provincial firm that had managed what was assumed to be impossible—what the law firms in Oslo hadn’t been capable of: getting Anders Rask’s case reopened. Or perhaps more correctly, gaining Anders Rask’s trust so they could reopen the case.
Bergmann moved toward the chairs in front of th
em, as if he was hosting the meeting. Rask sat down without bothering to shake Bergmann’s hand. Bergmann was relieved. Something in him resisted the idea; he would prefer not to feel Anders Rask’s long, delicate fingers against his own skin.
“This isn’t an interrogation, is it?”
Rask raised a trembling hand to his greasy gray hair.
“No,” said Bergmann, sitting down across from him. He exchanged a quick glance with the two nurses, who had assumed their positions along the wall. Gundersen cleared his throat, but remained silent as he sat down.
“I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been asked to look into the Kristiane case. I won’t ask you any questions about the other killings you’re convicted of, or the assaults. Only Kristiane.”
Rask got that sneer around his mouth again. His gaze, which Bergmann believed was affected by the medication he took, grew vacant again.
“Why did you ever admit to a murder that you now maintain you didn’t commit?”
Rask looked as if he didn’t understand the question.
“I cried the day they found her,” he said.
Lies, thought Bergmann. Damned lies. He could have told Rask that he was one of the people who found her, but he didn’t want to give Rask anything for free.
“Do you know who killed her? Was that why you confessed?” Bergmann leaned forward in his chair.
Something in Rask’s face changed. He blinked a few times, and his head rocked a little from side to side, as if the questions were unpleasant to him.
“So,” said the attorney. “You said this wasn’t an interrogation, Bergmann, isn’t that so?”
“Or did you want to be famous, read about yourself in the newspaper?”
“I think that—” began Gundersen.
“Let him answer,” said Bergmann.
The man before him—Norway’s most despised man—looked like nothing more than a worn-out boy as he sat squirming in his chair.
The room became quiet. The five men waited in silence for about thirty seconds.
“Has he read about the murder that happened a few weeks ago?” Bergmann asked, turning to Gundersen.
“Yes,” Rask replied.
“Where?”
“In the newspaper.”
“Who do you think did it?”
Rask appeared to disappear into his thoughts again, incapable of orienting himself in the reality outside his head.
“You were Kristiane’s teacher?” said Bergmann.
Rask nodded and smiled, once again with that slight sneer. The smile seemed misplaced to Bergmann. In fact, his gaze, hands, mouth, and feet all seemed to have a life of their own; Rask’s various parts didn’t seem to fit together into a greater whole.
“In which—”
“French and English, a little arts and crafts. I guess I had her in PE too. And crafts. Did I say that?” He nodded at the wall, the woodcut.
“What did you think of her at school?”
Yet another long pause ensued.
“You don’t have to answer,” said Gundersen.
“Haven’t you ever done anything crazy yourself, Tommy? I see it in you. You did something crazy, something really crazy one time.” Rask’s voice was low, barely audible. “And Tommy. What kind of name is that? And why aren’t you taking notes? I don’t talk to just anyone . . . Tommy.”
This time it was Bergmann’s turn to respond with silence.
“Anders,” said Gundersen. Then, turning to Bergmann: “I don’t know if this was such a good idea.”
“No,” said Rask, apparently more to himself than to anyone else in the room. “This wasn’t such a good idea.”
Bergmann nodded. He remembered his thoughts from earlier. What was it he’d seen? Himself?
He felt a cold hand on his own. Rask had leaned over the table. One of the nurses stepped forward.
“It’s okay,” said Bergmann. He met Anders Rask’s gaze. Looking at him now, it was obvious that Rask was heavily medicated. How many diagnoses he had was hard to say; it was at the very least a good cocktail of personality disorders.
“Remove your hand,” Bergmann said calmly.
When Rask pulled back his hand, he seemed to collapse.
“He’s worn out,” said the nurse.
“We can stop.” Rask seemed lost to this world. Bergmann looked at the clock. He had plenty of time to make it to handball practice, would even have time to drop by the office for an hour or two. Handball, he thought. Maybe that was why he felt doubly connected to Kristiane Thorstensen. It wasn’t just that he’d been involved in finding her; she’d also been one of the city’s biggest handball talents in her age group. In the fall of 1988 she had transferred from her local Oppsal club to Nordstrand to get higher quality coaching. According to Jon-Olav Farberg he was the one who had encouraged the change of clubs. She had played her final matches at the Nordstrand sports facility on the last evening she was seen alive.
“Yes, let’s stop,” said Gundersen, getting up.
“Just one last question,” said Bergmann. He tried to catch Rask’s gaze. “Who was it that visited you the first year you were here?”
Rask only stared vacantly out into the room.
Gundersen cleared his throat. Then he shook Bergmann’s hand hard, as if to indicate his gratitude that the Oslo police was taking the reopening of the case seriously. He seemed to want it understood that Rask may have suffered from a transitional mental illness, that he had a sick need to stand out as important.
“Thank you,” said Bergmann. “But I think you know more than you’re telling me, Anders. Because you’re an important person, right?”
He turned toward Rask, but the man just sat as if frozen, holding onto the arms of the chair, and appeared to long for the black forest on the other side of the barbed-wire fence.
“If there’s anything we can do . . .” said Gundersen.
Bergmann walked out into the corridor. He was once again seized by the feeling that he’d been here before.
“Tommy!”
Rask’s voice resounded from the visitor’s room and echoed down the corridor, until it fell silent against the locked door to the next ward zone. There was something desperate in his voice; it was nearly cracking with despair.
Attorney Gundersen shook his head lightly.
“He’s . . . worn out.” It seemed as if he had run out of things to say about him.
The tall, ungainly nurse appeared in the doorway with Rask by his side.
“You came here to get help,” said Rask. His voice had a pompous strain.
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go over here.” Rask nodded toward the window on the far wall. “It’s so dark in there. I don’t like that side, I’ve tried to get a room facing Mjøsa for years, but it’s never happened. Do you know why?”
“No.” So Dr. Furuberget didn’t want to give Rask a room with the same view that he himself had, but considered it fine for him to work in the workshop with knives and cutting tools. Bergmann didn’t even try to understand the logic there.
Once they had come to the end of the corridor, Rask stood by the window and observed the view through the grate.
“There is so much beauty in this world, Tommy.”
Bergmann understood that Rask was not a simple mystery. He suddenly seemed like a completely different person, as if his entire personality had changed in the course of a few minutes.
“It’s nice on this side. I can see why you’d want to have a room over here.”
“You’re a handball coach?” said Rask. “For girls? The same age as Kristiane?”
Bergmann didn’t answer; he just looked at Gundersen. Someone must have told Rask what they knew about him. But Rask shouldn’t know; somehow that seemed dangerous. Soon he would probably find out where he lived too. The TV, he thought. And the padlock.
He shook it off.
Coincidences.
“Kristiane was beauty itself. She was strength, truth, and beauty. She could have chosen between pi
ano and handball, you know that, don’t you, Tommy?”
“Yes.”
“She was a proper girl. I would never have dreamed of doing anything to harm her.”
Bergmann said nothing, but couldn’t help from having his own thoughts.
“You’ve seen pictures of her, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“What do you see in her eyes, Tommy? In the pictures from middle school.”
“What do I see?”
“In that picture that appeared in the newspaper when she disappeared.”
“I see a girl. An ordinary girl.”
Rask smiled again.
“An ordinary girl,” he repeated, his expression serious, without so much as a hint of his earlier sneer.
“What do you see?” said Bergmann.
“I ran into her at the store a few weeks before she disappeared. I was on sick leave most of that fall. Hadn’t seen her since eighth grade.”
Or do you mean a few weeks before you killed her? thought Bergmann. He noticed that they were now more or less surrounded by the two nurses and Gundersen.
“Yes?”
“And do you know what I saw?”
The two men measured each other with their eyes; Rask looked as though he’d gotten over the lethargy brought on by his meds.
“She had a glass plate between reason and something else that rested inside her. The madness, Tommy, that rested inside her.”
Bergmann slowly shook his head.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone had lit a fire in her, Tommy. Someone had set fire to the madness inside her that summer between eighth and ninth grade. Don’t you understand what I mean?”
“Her boyfriend?”
Rask sneered again.
“He was nothing more than a pimply boy. Besides, they broke up before that summer.”
He took hold of the collar of Bergmann’s jacket, carefully, not hard.
“Anders.” The nurse’s voice was calm.
“The fire,” said Anders Rask and let go. “Someone lit the fire in her, Tommy.” His eyes grew vacant again, and he had to support himself against the metal grate on the window.
