Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  She turned around and went back the same way she’d come. Police headquarters stood like the Ice Castle among the trees in the park, as if she were on her way to see the Snow Queen in the Hans Christian Andersen story.

  The Snow Queen.

  The evil witch.

  A woman had written a letter to Rask, wasn’t that what Bergmann had said? Medusa’s tears?

  Susanne turned on her PC and looked at the clock. She called the taxi dispatch and ordered a taxi for ten to five; it would just have to do. She entered “Medusa” in the search field and skimmed the text.

  A monster from Greek mythology. Living poisonous snakes as hair. Anyone who looked her right in the eyes would turn to stone. Medusa was originally a strikingly beautiful young woman, “the jealous longing of many suitors,” but when she was captured and raped by Poseidon, “the Lord of the Sea,” in Athena’s own temple, the furious Athena had Medusa’s hair transformed into snakes and made her face so ghastly that no one could look at her without turning to stone.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said to herself.

  Edle Maria. Medusa.

  No. She would have to check the report Bergmann had written from the interview with Farberg.

  She found the file in the common area, but the printer in the copy room was out of paper. On the corkboard there was a postcard from Mombasa, a notice about Christmas lunch, and a thank-you card featuring a bridal couple, a younger female colleague. Someone had printed out an e-mail from his wife about a Christmas celebration at Stabekk School. She read the text surreptitiously and sat down on the floor with an unopened ream of paper in her hands.

  “Have a nice day. Love you,” it said at the bottom.

  She guided her index finger over the last two words.

  “Love you,” she whispered. “I still love you.”

  44

  Even on the easy listening radio stations, there was hardly anything but reports about Rask and Jensrud’s escape, interspersed with the customary talentless commercials, so poorly executed a person would do almost anything to avoid hearing them. He turned the dial to NRK on the old Blaupunkt radio. Vestoppland was still responsible for the search, which suited Bergmann fine. The newscaster reported the same things Fredrik Reuter had summarized on Bergmann’s voice mail while he’d been with Flatanger up at Kripo: The dark-blue Opel Corsa the two escapees had used for their flight from Ringvoll had been found burned in the Sørum municipality. The nurse who had now been named Anders Rask’s lover had probably placed another car in the vicinity of the isolated forest road in Sørum. But as long as she stubbornly denied having helped the two men with even one car, Rask and Jensrud were now in flight in an unknown vehicle. The dilemma was obviously to not create panic, while making what the police’s PR people called “the general public” aware that Rask and Jensrud were dangerous and perhaps armed. The police chief in Vestoppland therefore had no choice but to advise everyone in Østlandet to exercise caution and not open the door to strangers.

  Brilliant, thought Bergmann. One and a half million people now wouldn’t open the door to strangers. He parked the car in one of the few vacant spaces on Munkedamsveien and took the Raven pistol out of the glove compartment. If Rask and his companion were even thinking about visiting him, he would blow both their craniums from here to eternity.

  The idea that Rask might have been in his apartment nagged at him. It couldn’t be him; in any event, he couldn’t have been the one to break into his storage compartment. He needed to get hold of the neighbor’s drug addict son, though he already knew it wasn’t him or any of his buddies. They would have taken what little there was of value down there—some bottles of wine and old silverware Hege had left behind. Whoever had been in the compartment had been after something very specific. Or maybe whoever it was had just wanted to scare him. If that was the case, he’d succeeded fairly well. Better than Bergmann cared to admit. He couldn’t stand enemies he couldn’t see.

  He was irritated at himself as he stood in the elevator on his way up to the top floor of the building in Stranden. He put his hand on the pistol and checked that he’d closed the zipper on his pocket. Maybe it was silly, but he didn’t like people breaking into his place, or, more specifically, not people like this. People who had slaughtered seven girls and let them bleed to death.

  Morten Høgda answered the door himself. Bergmann’s shoes had already made a wet pool on the Persian rug in the hall. Høgda’s gaze shifted to the puddle, as if Bergmann were just another servant. Good thing there’s wood flooring under it, thought Bergmann, disliking the man instinctively. The richer, the greedier.

  They went through a hallway lined with graphic art. Bergmann didn’t have time to study the motifs; he only caught random brush strokes in pastel colors. Høgda showed him into the living room, if you could call it that. The room was bigger than his own apartment.

  “You can hang your coat up here,” he said in a condescending tone and pointed at a coat rack, certainly from some designer Bergmann had never heard of.

  He had to smile. Høgda’s efforts at adopting an Oslo dialect were not particularly successful. But he’d landed one of the city’s best apartments for himself, he had to grant him that. The apartment had a maritime character; Bergmann might just as well have been on a boat. One side of the living room ended in an angle with an open 180-degree view of Rådhuset, Akershus fortress, Bunnefjorden, and Nesodden. The postcard-like view of the fortress and the sparkling lights from thousands of buildings had a hypnotizing effect on Bergmann.

  “Something to drink?”

  Høgda was standing over by the open kitchen. It did not smell of food or look as though the spotless kitchen was ever used. But that was hardly a surprise. He was the type who had household help come in twice a day and ate dinner out every evening.

  “Whiskey, cognac, or something nonalcoholic?”

  “Coke would be fine.”

  “Coke it is then.” Høgda had evidently gotten over his initial peevishness and now seemed to be trying to pour on what Bergmann often thought of as West Side charm, though he knew Høgda wasn’t from the West Side at all, but a little village in northern Norway. You don’t fool me, he thought. Either you had the laid-back self-confidence that financial security, education, and upbringing in the right postal codes gave you, or you didn’t. Not even a hundred million kroner on the tax form could change that. That was the weakness of the nouveau riche. Bergmann knew that Høgda was nothing but a simple fisherman’s son who had earned his first money by cleaning cod on the pier. If Høgda was smart, he’d realize that himself and put an end to his ostentatious overtures.

  “Where in northern Norway are you from again?” said Bergmann as Høgda set the glasses on the coffee table.

  “Kvænangen.” The answer came almost reluctantly.

  “Right,” said Bergmann. “So you’re not an Oslo boy? I don’t know where I got that from.” He smiled like the yokel he was pretending to be.

  Høgda appeared to shrink a little on the couch on the other side of the table. He took a drink from the whiskey glass, which was probably of the finest crystal. Here he’d spent his entire working life trying to make himself as refined as possible, with handmade shoes and razor-sharp creases in his trousers, and then an East Side slob like Tommy Bergmann plops down on his couch and the first thing he asks is which fishing village he’s from. He almost had to smile at himself. He considered revealing that his mother was from northern Norway to show him that they weren’t so different when it came down to it, but decided that could wait for another time.

  “Elisabeth told me that you know . . .” Høgda stared distantly down into his glass. It was already empty.

  “I just need to fill in a few holes in the investigation.” Høgda invited him to get right to the point, and Bergmann liked that.

  “Did you socialize much with Per-Erik and Elisabeth?”

  “To be quite honest, Bergmann . . .” Høgda stood up and went slowly to the kitchen, retrieve
d the bottle of Bushmills whiskey, and sat down again. He poured the glass half-full again. “I don’t understand why you need to talk to me. Elisabeth asked me to, and I’m doing it for her sake. Yes, we had a relationship for many years, behind the back of one of my very best friends, Per-Erik, and yes, I’m Alex’s father. He doesn’t know that, of course. I didn’t even know it myself for many years. But I don’t understand what any of that has to do with Kristiane. She was Per-Erik’s daughter, and God knows he adored her. She was everything to him, Bergmann, absolutely everything.”

  Bergmann had to think. Høgda was obviously not a coward—there was little doubt of that. He looked Bergmann in the eye with a serious expression on his face. His eyes were green, almost turquoise; those eyes had likely made him a bit of a ladies’ man in his prime. Now just over sixty, he looked drawn and worn, but he could probably still get the women he wanted. If not, he probably just took them anyway.

  “As I said,” said Bergmann, “we don’t need to talk for long. But I’d like to fill in the blank spaces in the investigation. Rask has got the case reopened, as you know, and now he’s escaped—”

  “Unbelievable,” said Høgda. “When you find him, you can just shoot him as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I hope they put up some resistance. That will give you solid grounds for getting rid of those two lunatics.” He took a big gulp from the whiskey glass.

  “Sure. But back to my question, you were a friend of the family?”

  “Definitely. Including both my first wife and my second wife.”

  “Even after Kristiane was born?”

  “Until she was killed, Bergmann, until Per-Erik called me that Sunday night and told me she’d been found. I’ve never heard a grown man cry like that. I would have done anything at all to lighten his grief, but there was nothing I could do. It was a double tragedy. He had behaved like a total swine to Elisabeth for many years, but pulled himself together to a degree I didn’t think he was capable of. And then the apple of his eye was killed. I thought he might kill himself. That was before I knew that Elisabeth had tried to.”

  He searched Bergmann’s gaze. Perhaps he knew Bergmann had been the one to stop the blood that was streaming from her wrist so long ago.

  “So you were together the night she disappeared?”

  “From two o’clock in the afternoon until eleven the next morning, Sunday.”

  “You were together the whole time?”

  He nodded.

  “What were you doing?”

  Høgda sniffed.

  “We were doing what people usually do when they’re unfaithful. I guess we were trying to fuck each other’s brains out.”

  Bergmann didn’t say anything.

  “Isn’t that what you do when you betray your respective spouses?”

  “I guess that’s it,” said Bergmann.

  “I was only one in an endless series of men.” Høgda appeared to be lost in thought. “For many years Elisabeth could have anyone she wanted. I guess it was a kind of consolation for her. Per-Erik was no angel.”

  “So you knew Kristiane well?”

  Høgda emptied the whiskey and stared into the glass awhile, as if the answer could be found at the bottom of it.

  “What are you suggesting, Bergmann?” His almost-turquoise eyes narrowed.

  “I just want to have a third party’s view of her, someone who could see her from a bit of a distance, and at the same time knew the family.”

  “I’m hardly a third party. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Høgda poured himself another glass of Bushmills and fell silent.

  “I’m trying to form an impression of Kristiane for myself.”

  “And what the hell is the point of that, so many years later? Do you think that will bring her back to life, Bergmann? Do you think that will help Elisabeth find peace in the years she has left on this earth?”

  Høgda got up and walked away, taking the whiskey glass with him. Bergmann stared down at his own hands, the little notepad, the blank page, the pen lying on the glass coffee table.

  The sound of a sliding door being opened broke the silence.

  Then a low sound came out of some unseen speakers. Probably built-in. An opera he’d heard before, a tenor he recognized.

  A cold draft passed over the living room floor, followed by the odor of cigarette smoke. Bergmann went back to the entry to find his own pack. As he passed through the corridor, he stopped and studied one of the prints. Now that he had time to look at them, he saw what they depicted. In one, a young Asian woman, probably Japanese, was hanging from the ceiling in an almost dark room, bound by her wrists with rope. Judging from her expression, she appeared to be writhing in pain, but it was difficult to tell. The body may have been covered with bruises, but it was hard to be sure due to the pastel red color laid over the surface of the picture in three apparently random brush strokes. But yes, thought Bergmann, feeling the nausea rise in his throat. He had to stop staring at the graceful body. Several of the other photographs depicted humiliated women in black and white with their hands tied behind their back, overlaid with slashes of yellow, pink, and green. The last picture Bergmann looked at before he went back to the living room was of a young woman, presumably also Japanese, lying dead in a casket—or perhaps just acting the part—strewn with orchid petals. Her face was purple with postmortem lividity.

  He tried to suppress the images from his mind as he went out to join Morten Høgda on the balcony. It was snowing more heavily now, and he could barely see the fortress. He still felt queasy after viewing the collection of . . . Of what? he thought. It was hardly art. It reminded him too much of something else. Of himself.

  “You have a few pictures on the wall.”

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” said Høgda, staring out at the city. He barely seemed to notice that Bergmann had come out onto the balcony. “Akira Nobioki. Paid a small fortune for them. People from across the globe have been collecting his work for years. From Tokyo to New York to Cape Town to Buenos Aires.”

  “You don’t have many visits from your grandchildren?” said Bergmann.

  “I don’t have many visitors. I’m not overly fond of people. And I don’t have children,” said Høgda.

  “You have Alex.”

  He laughed quietly.

  “Those pictures are in a class of their own. Nobioki has his own aesthetic. He puts out a couple of photo books every year, at reasonable prices, if you’re interested. Around ten or fifteen kroner, I think.”

  “Do you have any interests of that type?” said Bergmann. “Torture?”

  Høgda frowned.

  “Call it torture if you want. You’re no liberal, I’m guessing. What happens in the bedroom, stays in the bedroom, I say. It’s art, Bergmann. Art.”

  Bergmann lit a cigarette and smiled to himself. He thought he should have left, but he didn’t want to give Høgda that satisfaction. They stood there and smoked in silence. The snow dampened nearly all the city noise; only the faint rumble of a Nesodd ferry broke through the quiet music coming from inside the living room. Bergmann knew he’d heard that opera somewhere before. Høgda appeared to notice that Bergmann was trying to think of what music he was playing. He put out his cigarette, a filterless Camel, and took a new one from a pack on the weatherproof teak balcony table.

  “Why is Iago so evil?” said Høgda, lighting the cigarette. “You’re a policeman, can you answer that?”

  Othello, thought Bergmann. The music was Verdi’s Othello. Where had he heard that opera before? Once again he saw himself standing in the corridor at Ringvoll, meeting the eyes of the patient. A glass had fallen to the floor, he remembered that. A penetrating scream. Something I experienced as a child. That was clear to him now. But where?

  Suddenly it came back to him.

  His old neighbor in Tveita. He was one of the few men that his mother trusted.

  Høgda cleared his throat, then said quietly, “What satisfaction does he get from destroying Othello’s life? O
thello, who trusts him so blindly? Who exploits other people’s blindness so damned deliberately, Bergmann?”

  “I don’t know.” Bergmann barely remembered the story of Othello just then, but pretended otherwise.

  “Iago leads Othello to believe that his wife has been unfaithful with the man he has promoted, the man Iago believes got the advancement he himself deserves. But why does he do that? Did he want Othello to kill the woman he loved more than anything on earth? Did that give him satisfaction?”

  Bergmann did not answer. They smoked another cigarette in silence. Høgda took a few more slugs of whiskey. Bergmann knew he would have to come see Høgda another time. He wanted to read the rape reports to him personally, but pressuring him about them now would be foolish.

  “Kristiane was a great girl,” said Høgda. “What else can I say? She could have been anything at all, had whatever she wanted. Just like her mother. Lived a good life. Better than mine, God knows.”

  Bergmann nodded.

  “What about Alex?”

  Their eyes met. Høgda looked away.

  “What about him?”

  “Do you have any contact with him?”

  He shook his head.

  “He knows that you’re his father,” Bergmann tossed out, testing the assertion.

  “What does that have to do with the case?” said Høgda. His expression did not change.

  “Nothing.” Nothing other than that Elisabeth Thorstensen is lying to me, he thought.

  “Okay. Yes, he knows it. We’ve met a few times.”

  “I don’t like it when people lie to me.”

  “That was stupid.” Høgda was holding something back.

  “Did she ask you to lie? Elisabeth?”

  “No.”

  Bergmann didn’t pursue the matter. He didn’t believe Høgda, but he decided to drop it. What else could she lie about, or get others to keep quiet about? He noticed he had an incipient weakness for her, an impulse that would excuse why she was capable of telling a lie right to his face.

  For some reason, Høgda started talking about one of the boats tied up to the pier below them. Some Americans who had no doubt anchored there for the winter.