Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  He put the key in the mailbox lock and opened the little hatch.

  Two advertising flyers. And several white envelopes.

  All were postmarked Lillehammer December 20, four days ago. Twenty of them altogether. Second-class mail, which explained the delayed delivery. The handwriting was exactly alike on all the envelopes. He’d seen it before. Of course he had.

  He tore open the first envelope with his key. Inside it was a Christmas card, the cheap kind you can buy in any convenience store. He opened the card. A slip of paper fell out and landed on the dirty floor. It was a copy of an old black-and-white picture of a young man with glasses, in white tie and tails. Gustaf Fröding, thought Bergmann.

  He read the densely written text on the inside of the card.

  I am so excited about how that went. Susanne, wasn’t that what she said her name was? I know that act. Elisabeth never killed anyone other than Edle Maria. But she watched every time. I said it would make her healthy, and she believed it. She thought that Edle Maria would disappear from her body, that she would never haunt her again. She brought cassettes to me with their sounds. It was our music, Tommy. She called me from Tønsberg and said that she’d found a girl, a girl she wanted us to kill. She was with Morten at the cabin. She had seen a girl in town one day and followed her home. She soiled her with Morten, she knew that herself. Knowing that Elisabeth did everything I wanted . . . ? It gave me a power you will never understand. Do you think she killed me, Tommy? Maybe she hated me from the first time I came into her room at Sandberg. Maybe because I convinced her that Kristiane must be sacrificed too—she would become exactly like Elisabeth. A whore for her brother. Or no, for me. Just as Elisabeth had been for her father. These frivolous women. They destroy the world. No, women destroy the world. At last they’re all like that. That is all you need to understand. There is nothing else to understand on this earth. And that idiot Furuberget. He barely remembered me from the job at Sandberg. No surprise that Elisabeth fooled him. Maybe he didn’t want to see the truth when she was admitted after you found Kristiane. If you find me, you’ll find her patient record. As if that would tell you anything at all.

  I can tell you more. If you search in the right place.

  Trust yourself.

  Then you’ll find me. At last.

  Bergmann read the text over again. He shook his head. Some of it was incoherent, disconnected. Other parts made sense, though. If any of it was true, that is.

  He folded up the Christmas card and stuck it back in the envelope. Then he opened the next envelope.

  It was empty.

  The next seventeen envelopes were also empty.

  He paused before the last one. Another Christmas card, identical to the one in the first envelope, featuring a red wax candle in front of a Christmas wreath. The same handwriting.

  The Devil’s features.

  Where was I?

  Soul in flame, blood in dance.

  Where was I, Tommy?

  64

  Bergmann called Susanne. He closed his eyes and felt her next to him. The scent of her in his nostrils. And he’d never even liked her.

  “Yes?” she said a little sharply. Svein Finneland must have been there. Oh well. To each his own.

  “Never mind.”

  “Has something happened?”

  He thought about the Christmas card. The writing wasn’t the same as in the letter he’d found in Anders Rask’s blood-red book. It was like the writing in the letter he’d received. He understood just then that Elisabeth had written that letter to Rask, but Farberg had dictated it. The letter to Bergmann must have been written by Farberg, but dictated by Elisabeth. Unless he’d put the words in her mouth.

  “No. Talk to you later,” he said. And lock the door securely for once, he thought, but he chose not to say anything. Farberg wasn’t obsessed with Mathea. But what about Susanne herself?

  After checking all the rooms in his apartment, including the storage compartment in the basement, he sat down at his computer and did a search on Gustaf Fröding. “In the early 1890s Fröding was admitted to the sanatorium at Suttestad in Lillehammer, Norway,” he read. He clicked on the link to Suttestad. A kind of hotel was operated on the property, which was located a couple of miles outside the city. It had six large rooms, with a view of Lillehammer and the waters of Lågen.

  He took the stairs in two bounds and was out the door before he’d even thought about what he was doing. Not until he reached the Shell station at Skedsmokorset did it occur to him that he was unarmed. If I die tonight, there’s probably a reason for that, he thought.

  It was almost Christmas morning, and there was virtually no traffic on E6. Bergmann easily flew down the road at eighty miles per hour, as fast as his old heap of a car could tolerate.

  It was three thirty in the morning when he turned into the Suttestad estate. Bergmann parked by the storehouse. Large mounds of cleared snow towered up around him. The snow crunched under his feet, loud enough that anyone who was awake would have heard it through a closed window.

  Three cars were parked by the large white building, all of them with Lillehammer plates. He walked carefully up the steps to the main entrance and pounded hard on the door several times. Then he rang the bell that hung down from the balcony. The sound echoed between the old buildings.

  Bergmann tried not to think as he started pounding on the door again.

  Thirty seconds later, he heard muttering from somewhere up on the second floor, then steps on the stairs.

  “This is one heck of a note,” the voice said on the other side of the door.

  The lock slowly turned in the door.

  “What the hell is this?” he said, staring at Bergmann with a haggard look on his face.

  Bergmann held up his police identification.

  “Have you had any overnight guests here in the past few days?”

  “Honestly,” said the man, “is this something worth waking my kids up for?”

  “I drove here from Oslo. It’s important.”

  The man tightened the belt around his bathrobe and shook his head.

  “I’ve been in London on a soccer tour with my boy, but no, I don’t think so. You’ll have to ask my old lady.”

  He closed the door. Bergmann remained standing outside on the steps. After a while he heard steps on the stairs again. The man returned with a woman who looked a few years younger than her husband. She looked cold standing in the doorway in a kimono.

  “No,” she said. “Hasn’t been anyone here. Not many people this time of year.”

  “Sorry,” said the man. “We would have liked to be of help.”

  Bergmann held the woman’s gaze as she closed the door. He’d been doing this job long enough to see that she was lying. And that she was scared to death.

  He walked slowly back to the car. He lit a cigarette and got in. It was still warm enough inside that he could keep the engine turned off. After a second cigarette, the hall light came on, and the door opened.

  He got out of the car and took a few steps toward her. She pulled up the hood on her bubble jacket and jogged across the yard. Her breath steamed as she got into the passenger seat.

  “Fortunately he falls asleep quickly again.”

  She pointed at the pack of Prince cigarettes sitting on the console. He lit a cigarette for her. She smoked half of it in silence.

  “There was a man here. Vidar Østli, he called himself. Paid cash.” She stared stiffly ahead of her and talked in a low voice.

  “When?”

  “Two days ago. He said he was separated, thrown out of his house. Needed time to think.”

  Bergmann could not help inhaling deeply. She turned toward him.

  “Who is he?” she said.

  “Which room did he stay in?”

  “The big one. The corner room.”

  “You have to show me that room.”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t say. He’d kill me.”<
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  “What do you mean?”

  “You mustn’t mention this to anyone. If I show you the room, you must never say that you’ve been here.”

  Bergmann opened the car door, and he studied her when the interior light came on. She was young, perhaps in her early thirties. They got out.

  Everything was dark around them. The city lights sparkling in the distance seemed like another planet. She led him to the gable end of the main building, where there was a separate entrance to the guesthouse.

  “This was a sanatorium at one time?” he said as they went up the stairs to the second floor.

  “Yes. It’s a little disturbing to think about that, though. Sometimes I think I hear sounds at night.”

  They walked down a dark corridor. She turned on the light in the room at the end. It was a large room with windows on two walls.

  “I was just going to change his bed. He paid for two nights.”

  “Yes?”

  “He came into the room. Slipped in, I didn’t even hear him come in. He said to me, ‘If you ever say that I stayed here, I’ll come after you.’ Then he just stood there in the middle of the room.”

  “Who have you told this to?”

  “No one.”

  “Not even your husband?”

  “No. He’s so hot-tempered, I’m sure he would have tried to find him. Good Lord, I have three kids. I can’t even sleep at night anymore.”

  Bergmann put his hand on her shoulder.

  “He’s not coming back.”

  She closed her eyes, unable to hold back the tears.

  “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “I think it was blue, but I don’t remember exactly. Maybe gray. He frightened me so. At the same time he was so calm.”

  “Blue?”

  He looked away and stared out at the city. It would be hopeless if he didn’t get a search under way tonight. He had a feeling it wouldn’t do any good.

  “In the morning on the second day the dog barked so much at his car that I had to bring him in.”

  “What kind of car was it? You must try to remember. Model, size?”

  “A delivery van,” she said quietly. “It was a delivery van. Pretty big. The kind that tradesmen use, you know.”

  The girl, thought Bergmann. Amanda. She’s alive.

  He opened the window and put on the catch. Cold air poured in and made it easier to breathe. It was as if the room had threatened to suffocate him. He leaned out of the window and looked out at the city lights blurred by the cold fog like brush strokes.

  “And the dog barked at the car?”

  “He never does that. But he was marking, somehow. Like during a hunt.”

  Bergmann only needed to search for a few minutes. In the top drawer of the nightstand, under a worn tourist brochure, was yet another Christmas card, just like the ones he’d received in the mail.

  Bergmann recognized the handwriting.

  Soul in flame, blood in dance.

  Where am I, Tommy?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2014 Charlotte Hveem

  Gard Sveen is an award-winning crime novelist who divides his time between writing and working as a senior adviser to the Norwegian Ministry of Defense. The Last Pilgrim, his debut novel, was originally published as Den siste pilgrimen in Norway and is the first in the series featuring troubled police detective Tommy Bergmann.

  The novel was an instant hit with critics and readers, and it went on to win the Riverton Prize in 2013, the prestigious Glass Key in 2014, and the Maurits Hansen Award, also in 2014. Sveen is the only author to date who has received all three honors for a first novel. The only other author who has managed to win both a Riverton and a Glass Key for their debut novel is Jo Nesbø.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Paul Norlen is a translator based in Seattle, Washington.