by Gard Sveen
Her pulse was racing by the time she knocked on her own front door. She simply didn’t have the energy to take the key out of her jacket pocket.
“Good Lord, what is it with you?” asked Torvald. He looked more handsome than ever, and she couldn’t help but smile.
“Nothing. Just a little tired. Did it go okay?”
“Like a dream. I want a little one like that, you know?”
“So marry me.”
He took her jacket, held the coyote fur up to his face, and studied himself in the mirror in the hall.
“Watch it, Liberace. Will you have a glass of wine with me before you go downstairs?” Susanne squeezed out of her boots and headed to Mathea’s room.
She pushed the door open quietly. In the faint glow from the skylight, she saw her daughter lying on top of the duvet. One leg hung over the edge of the bed.
She sat down at the foot of the bed and stroked the little bare leg. I love you, she thought. I really love you.
Torvald appeared in the doorway with a half-full glass of wine in his hand.
“Has something happened?” he whispered.
“No.” She stood up and took the glass from his hand.
She lay down on the couch with her head on his lap while the TV hummed in the background. A rerun of some English talk show Torvald had missed over the weekend.
Ten minutes later she was fast asleep. She was soon trapped in a nightmare she hadn’t had since she was a child. Alone in the cellar of an old house. Raw, damp air and rough concrete walls. Everything was dark, and she fumbled along the wall, her hands bleeding. Mathea’s voice was barely audible as she called to her. Occasionally, she screamed like she was being tortured, then cried out like an infant—“Mommy!”—as if she’d just learned to talk.
She gasped for air and opened her eyes.
Torvald placed one hand on her forehead.
“What is it, Susanne? It’s something to do with work, isn’t it?”
She got up without answering him and picked up her phone. It was already eleven thirty.
“I have to get some sleep, my friend. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Eternally grateful.” She kissed him on the cheek and pulled him up off the couch.
He picked up his shoes and took hold of the doorknob. For a moment he stood there, looking at her as if he wanted to say something.
“What is it?” she said.
“We’ll talk tomorrow.” He walked out the door, and Susanne watched him, even though he was only going down one floor.
Eleven thirty, she thought, making sure that the safety chain on the door was fastened.
She studied herself in the entry mirror. The incipient wrinkles around her eyes, the furrow on her forehead—all inherited from her mother. To hell with her, she thought. To hell with everything. She gripped the phone in her hand. Can I call him now? Don’t I have to?
“Very close to here.” It must have been. Or was Kristiane going to see someone else? Susanne knew that she’d gone through less than a third of the names, much less looked up everyone who was related to the residents or had once been part of the family.
She went back to the living room and flopped down on the couch. The last remnants of warmth from Torvald could still be felt in the fabric. Audience laughter burbled quietly from the TV. She looked around the big loft apartment. It had been too big for the three of them, Nicolay, her, and Mathea. Now it seemed absurdly large. Cavernous. And dark.
She picked up the glass of red wine and brought it to her lips.
Her phone rang out in the hall. She’d set it down on the old dresser. She went to grab it, taking her glass with her.
I have to call Tommy, she thought.
It was Torvald.
“Had you gone to bed?” he said.
“No. Soon. You’re not mad at me? I’m just tired. Nothing more than that.”
He didn’t answer.
“Torvald?”
“I just have to tell you this. I almost forgot.”
His voice sounded different, as if he was nervous about what he was about to say. Susanne felt the hairs on her neck standing up. This was not good, this could not be good.
“What?” she said, more sternly than she intended.
“Mathea told me tonight, right before she was going to bed . . .” He stopped.
Susanne tightened her grip on the wine glass. The gaze that met her own in the entry mirror was hollow; she hardly recognized herself. “Calm down,” she mouthed to herself. Don’t get hysterical, wasn’t that what that cursed mother of hers always said to her?
“What did Mathea tell you?” That the new daycare teacher, a pleasant young man, had touched her, she thought. I’ll kill him. Cut off everything.
“No. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Tell me. Now.”
“She said she was alone in the playground today, she likes to go out there . . .”
Susanne’s hands and arms had gone numb. Her head felt white, blanked out by a snowstorm.
“Said she started talking with a lady outside the fence. A nice lady, but Mathea said she was a little startled. She said she would come back one day, but Mathea must promise not to say anything to anyone.”
“Who would come back?”
“The lady. That Mathea talked to. She thought Mathea was pretty.” Torvald’s voice was barely audible.
“Why the hell didn’t you call me, Torvald? Are you aware of—” She stopped herself. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t be angry, Susanne. Please. I forgot.”
“Forgot? You can’t forget that kind of thing!”
“I’m sorry.” He sounded like a child now.
“Okay.” A sudden calm came over her. She didn’t need two kids. “It’s all right.”
The sudden calm disappeared as soon as Torvald started talking again. He said a word—only a single little word—but she was unable to understand what came after it. Then he said two words and Susanne almost dropped her glass.
“Edle Maria,” he said. “It sounded so strange, I just—”
Susanne stared at herself in the mirror, watching her face grow gradually more distorted. Now she was the one who was crying like a child.
“Susanne. Say something. Say something, anything at all.”
She didn’t even notice the wine glass slipping from her hand, just heard the sound of shattered glass. Her gaze shifted apathetically down to the floor. The red wine looked like blood on the floorboards, splashed up over her pant legs.
“Say it isn’t true,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Maria. Edle Maria. Say it isn’t true.”
“But that’s what Mathea said. That the lady said her name was Edle Maria.”
57
Only nice-looking girls smoke Marlboro Lights, thought Bergmann, reaching behind the books on his bookcase. He’d run out of Prince cigarettes and searched the entire apartment for an emergency smoke he’d hidden away for moments such as this one.
There. His hand felt a soft pack. Something Hege had left behind. Duty-free, he didn’t remember which trip. One of those disastrous times. Weren’t they all? No, not all.
He had just lit the all-white filter cigarette when his phone rang. He looked at his watch. Alexander Thorstensen, he thought. Or maybe the guy in Surveillance, who had Morten Høgda in his sights. You could have wiped your ass with the first report. Høgda had been at the office until eight o’clock. Then he’d walked right across the street into his building. Five minutes later the lights went on in his apartment. He was still there.
He didn’t manage to answer it in time, but it started ringing again at once.
Susanne, he thought. Now?
As soon as he’d pressed the green “Answer” button, she started shouting, “You have to come. You have to come.”
“If you calm down, I’ll think about it.”
She fell silent. He could hear that she was crying.
“She wants my child, Tommy.”
He shook his head.
“What are you talking about?”
“Maria,” she whispered. “Edle Maria.”
“Edle Maria?”
Susanne said nothing.
He held the phone to his ear while he worked his left arm into the sleeve of his bubble jacket. The Raven pistol pressed against his chest. He had a feeling that he was going to have use for it.
“Are you at home?”
He heard a barely audible “yes.”
“Hurry,” she said. “Just hurry.”
The trustworthy Escort started on the first try. He double-parked in front of her building. A man answered the entry phone.
“Who are you?” said Bergmann.
“A friend,” said the voice. It sounded as though he was crying too. Bergmann shook his head. There were some things he didn’t understand.
Susanne answered the door. She pulled him to her as if she’d been waiting for him her whole life.
“Edle Maria,” she whispered. “Edle Maria was at the daycare center.”
Bergmann became aware of noise coming from inside the apartment. The TV was on. A children’s movie.
Susanne told him what had happened. How her daughter had talked to a lady by the fence at the daycare center who said her name was Edle Maria, and who said she thought Mathea was so pretty.
He went into the living room and nodded to the good-looking man who was sitting there.
“Torvald,” said Susanne. Bergmann shook his hand. “Neighbor and friend. My best friend. Mathea,” she said. “Can you tell Tommy what happened?”
Her daughter didn’t answer. She was lying on the other end of the couch, staring at the TV with eyes as big as saucers.
Bergmann took the remote control from the coffee table and turned off the TV.
“I think you have to help us, Mathea.”
“She was nice.”
“Good to hear.”
“I’m going to talk to her tomorrow. At daycare.”
“What color was her hair? Do you remember?”
“I want to watch the movie.”
“Was it light or dark?”
“Don’t know.”
“Mathea,” said Susanne. “You have to—”
“Let her watch the movie,” said Bergmann. He got up from the couch and pointed toward the kitchen. Susanne poured red wine into a glass, but he shook his head. She drank it herself in two big gulps, as if it were juice. “Did you print out the articles about the Edle Maria case?”
She nodded. “But they’re at the office.”
“I’m going up there.”
“I just don’t understand. She’s supposed to be dead.”
“What did you do today?”
“She was going to Skøyen, Tommy. I think I know who she was going to see too.”
“Who?”
“I think he was the one she was in love with.”
Bergmann frowned. This was too cryptic for him.
“Farberg. Jon-Olav Farberg. He lived in Skøyen then.”
“Are you sure? Impossible,” he said. “One of the people we’re searching for knows me. Or my mother. It can’t be Farberg.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have a computer?”
She pointed down the hallway.
“In Nico’s old office.”
“Edle Maria is dead,” said Bergmann. “She must be dead.” She was killed in the same town my mother was from. That was an unavoidable fact, a fact that almost made him physically ill.
He opened the web browser and entered “Gustaf Fröding” in the search field. A series of pictures came up on the screen. He clicked on the picture he’d noticed before, the yellowed black-and-white photograph. At the bottom in white script, it read, “John Norén. Goodwin. Uppsala.”
“Reuter thinks that the person who wrote the letter to me referred to one of this guy’s poems. And Elisabeth thinks that Kristiane was in love with Alexander, her brother. She never said a word about Farberg.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Susanne said quietly, standing beside him.
He turned toward Susanne. She pointed at the screen.
“That picture.”
“What about it?”
“It’s him. It’s him, Tommy.”
“Who?”
“Jon-Olav Farberg. The teacher. Her coach. I was at his house. He could have killed me, Tommy. I think he thought about it while I was there. That he wanted to kill me. We were alone in his house. All alone.”
Bergmann stood up and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Start at the beginning, Susanne. What are you talking about?”
“That picture is hanging in his library.”
He went out into the hall without a word, and Susanne followed a few steps behind.
“Get a towel,” he said.
She looked perplexed, but did as he said.
He took the pistol out of the inside pocket of his bubble jacket and wrapped the towel around it.
“No questions,” he said. “If he comes, don’t think. Aim for the stomach.”
58
He crashed through the turnstile on the first floor. The Securitas guard called out something behind him, but he was already halfway up the stairs.
Farberg, he thought, while his blood threatened to burst his temples. Did he dress up in women’s clothes? Was he two people in one mind, as Rune Flatanger had suggested?
He yanked on the glass doors after holding his identification up to the card reader. Locked.
Once again. A click in the door. He waited two seconds and opened it slowly, then pressed on the light switch.
“Fucking door,” he mumbled as he jogged down the corridor to Susanne’s office. Fluorescent lights came on one by one above him. As if that would help him think clearly. Jon-Olav Farberg? What did he have to do with Edle Maria? Because Edle Maria was the key. She must be. And Farberg had a picture of Fröding at home.
It was him. It really was him, the pig that had fed him that line about Anders Rask’s presumed friend, Yngvar.
I’ll bash your skull in as soon as I find you. But first you’re going to tell me about Edle Maria.
Susanne had placed all the printouts on the Edle Maria case in a separate folder. He skimmed the text in the first printout. 1962, he thought. They’d written almost nothing about the case. That was back when the press kowtowed to the authorities, and no one asked critical questions about the obviously miserable investigation.
He took out his phone and called Fredrik Reuter.
“This better be fucking important.”
“It’s barely midnight, only children have gone to bed by now.”
“Well? Have you found the thirteen-year-old in Kolbotn?”
“Call Papa. I need weaponry and two active patrols.”
Reuter did not answer.
“We’ve found him.”
“Where?”
“Malmøya. Jon-Olav Farberg. One of her teachers. Colleague of Rask’s.”
“Malmøya. Give me the address.”
Bergmann heard from his voice that Reuter was not far from heading down into his basement and unlocking his own gun cabinet.
It’s only a question of which one of us is going to kill him first, thought Bergmann as he got into one of the patrol cars. He unholstered the old Smith & Wesson revolver as they headed down Tøyenbekken, past Mandalls Gate. He looked over his shoulder past the World Islamic Mission, toward Susanne’s apartment.
59
As they approached the driveway to Farberg’s house, the patrol cars turned off their lights and continued with only their parking lights on. Bergmann raised his service revolver and tried to get an overview of the house. The car slid across the snow like a glider. The house looked abandoned. Just one light was visible on the second floor, besides the outdoor light.
He edged carefully out of the car with the revolver in ready position. His bulletproof Kevlar vest felt like a straitjacket, and he wanted to tear it off. He was going to kill Farber
g before he even managed to go on the attack. Taking Farberg alive—if he did attack—was never going to happen.
Gesturing with his arms, the operative commander sent one of his four men to the side of the house and another to the front, down toward the water. At least they had MP5s with red-dot sight and light, not an old, almost scrap revolver like Bergmann’s.
Bergmann had a brief discussion with the commander in the cover of the big Dodge van and decided to follow the officer who’d gone behind the house. He edged his way through the snow, his shoes getting colder and wetter with every step. The officer was already up on the patio on the sea-facing side of the house. Bergmann was quickly by his side. The lights were off on this side of the house too. The officer placed himself behind the nearest wall and shone the rifle light through the living room windows. Bergmann placed himself on the other side of the living room window.
He saw the officer shaking his head.
“Can’t see a thing.”
There was a crackle in the walkie-talkie.
“We’ll ring the doorbell,” said the commander.
“Received,” said the officer. He raised his machine gun and aimed at the porch door. The red-dot sight moved across the living room floor. A couch. Bookcases. Fireplace.
A glimpse of someone.
A person.
The thirteen-year-old, thought Bergmann. He hasn’t hidden her here in the living room, has he, or killed her here?
“Wait,” he said out loud. The officer jumped.
“No one’s answering,” said the commander.
Bergmann placed his hands on the windowpane and tried to see into the living room. He had to hold his breath so as not to fog up the glass, but that only worked for a few seconds. His pulse was pounding so fast that he was unable to manage without oxygen. If Farberg was standing somewhere deep inside the living room, he could easily have used Bergmann’s face as a target.
He detected the faint sound of a car in the distance. Or not. A gust of wind passed through the trees behind them. Then silence, darkness.
And a car. Pulling up in front of the house.
He pressed his face against the glass again.
A person lay on the couch that faced the windows toward the sea. It might be Farberg.
