The Whisperer

by Karin Fossum

  She ate more slowly than usual, she was indignant. As though someone had spoken behind her back or started a rumour. Indignant, as she had never bothered anyone, had never stood out, had never been derogatory about anyone, neither as a child nor as an adult. She was offended. She was deeply disturbed. She sniffed again, finished her food and stood up, took the rubbish bin out from under the sink, tied up the bag, pushed her feet into some shoes and went out, carried the rubbish down to the road. Opened the bin. She saw that it was half full. She looked down Kirkelina, in case she could see or hear anyone, then she looked up towards the church. She could just make out the spire. Her neighbour Olaf appeared with his dog, walking towards the church. They were both wearing yellow reflective coats. She stayed where she was as she thought it might be nice to have a quick word with him. She knew Olaf well, they had always been neighbours. His Rottweiler, Dolly, spotted her and pulled at the lead. Ragna had never met another Rottweiler as small as Dolly. The dog still looked like a puppy and would never grow up, it seemed. She looked at her kind neighbour and longed for only one thing, that he would tell her that he had also found a ridiculous threat in his mailbox. A note that he was going to die. And only his surname on the envelope, no sender. But he said nothing about receiving such a letter, he was as carefree and happy as always, nothing was weighing on his mind. He was a man, anyway, he had a voice, some muscle even, she thought, he was broad-shouldered, and strong, and a good deal older than her. Instead he looked up at the street light by her house and said: ‘I envy you that light, Ragna. It’s pitch dark outside ours.’

  He pulled Dolly back as she was straining at the lead.

  ‘But I’m sure you deserve it,’ he added with a smile.

  Ragna wondered what he meant. Maybe he meant she needed that extra bit of help as she had lost her voice, after all, she had a handicap. Oh, I’m being mean now, she realised, Olaf is a good man. Olaf can hear what I’m saying, even if a lorry drives by as I open my mouth, he just moves closer, he listens and reads my lips.

  ‘The Teigens are moving,’ he told her and nodded to the house opposite hers. The house she could see from the kitchen and bedroom.

  ‘Oh!’ she whispered in surprise.

  ‘A Thai family with two children have bought the house,’ he continued. ‘They’re going to open a small restaurant in town, and apparently the wife has been given permission to run a massage clinic. At home. In one of the rooms in the basement.’

  ‘What?’ She couldn’t help herself. ‘Massage?’

  Olaf burst out laughing when he saw her expression.

  ‘I’m sure it’s all very above board. Evidently she has a qualification from Thailand and knows a lot about bad backs. It’ll probably be pretty reasonable as well, and she’ll only be open every other day.’

  ‘Will you go?’ Ragna whispered.

  ‘I expect so,’ Olaf said. ‘If the wife doesn’t mind. They’re very beautiful, those Thai ladies.’

  He winked at her when he said that. The reflection of the street light made his eyes sparkle. He turned and followed a car with his eyes as it cruised past them and on up towards the church. They could just see the clock on the spire, where the pale face shone like the moon.

  ‘The doctor says my bones are starting to look like a Christmas tree covered in snow, because of all the calcification,’ he told her. ‘Come on, Dolly! We need to carry on.’

  He walked off with the dog behind him, and she watched their yellow reflective jackets dance into the dark. He had not had a letter. Only she had received a letter. She turned and went back up to the house, settled down on her chair in front of the television, and turned on the news channel. She had to know what was going on in the world, her own was so incredibly small, and her colleagues always discussed the night’s news when they came to work the next day, and she wanted to be part of that. If anything had happened in Berlin, she paid particular attention. But the images did not hold her attention in the same way as usual. She was constantly distracted – the distraction was like a nail in her head, and it had struck something deep down. She sat still with her hands in her lap, and told herself she was a fool for not burning the letter immediately in the wood stove. She had not even torn it to shreds or crumpled it up, the letter was lying in the rubbish bin down by the road, just as complete as when she first read it. The threat still held, she had not destroyed it, it lay there screaming, screaming so loudly that the bin lid was banging, and no doubt the whole of Kirkelina could hear the noise. Hear that she was anxious and useless in number 7, a woman without a man, without even a voice. She got up and crossed the room, went out into the hall, put on her shoes and opened the door, strode down to the road, and opened the rubbish bin. Bent over. It was dark, and she had her back to the street light and she could scarcely see a thing. Which bag was it in? The one on top, or the one that had fallen slightly to the side? Some were from Irfan’s shop, plain white with no advertisements, but she found a couple from Europris with the green logo. Now, try to remember, which bag had she taken out from under the sink? She rummaged around in the rubbish, squeezed the bags one after the other, trying to feel what was inside. Eventually, she pulled one out. The lid slammed into place. She was about to turn back to the house when Olaf appeared again, on his way back. He glanced at the bag dangled in her hand and she blushed.

  ‘Ah,’ he said with a smile. ‘We sometimes have to dig out things from the rubbish that we’ve thrown away by accident too. Was it a lottery ticket? With the winning number?’

  She pulled the bag to her chest and shook her head.

  ‘Took the wrong one by mistake,’ she whispered. ‘I leave the bags out in the hall, and some need to go down into the basement and others out to the rubbish. I’m having a clear-out.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of moving as well, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no, I’ll never move.’

  She turned away from him and trudged up to the house, closed the door. Her cheeks were still burning with shame. She was fond of Olaf. She could not imagine life without him, her kind elderly neighbour, who always had a good word to say and who maybe looked out for her, checked to see if the light was on in the morning, a sure sign that she was still alive. Or kept an eye out in case the house went up in flames or someone broke in. He knew that she could not scream.

  Back in the house, she opened the bag of rubbish. The envelope had been pushed down and was pressed against a moist potato peeling, and some eggs that had passed their sell-by date. Some of them had broken. She plucked it out with two fingers and went straight over to the wood burner, put it down on the grey ash beside some charcoal, got the firelighter from the table. But the envelope was damp and would not burn.

  Chapter 3

  Her face came alive as she talked. She captivated him, despite her lack of voice. She radiated sincerity. Every now and then she held up a hand and made a gesture in the air as if to underline something, to help herself, to create the illusion of sound. Her whispering made him lower his own voice. He listened with such intensity that he could no doubt have heard a cat creeping up on its prey.

  ‘You told no one,’ Sejer said. ‘Not your neighbours, or your colleagues, or Irfan in the shop or anyone else you knew. Nor Rikard Josef in Berlin. Of course the letter you found in your mailbox was a threat. That came from nowhere, like a bolt out of the blue. But you confided in no one.’

  Ragna could see his face clearly in the light from the computer screen. The deep lines that ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, the straight eyebrows that had once been dark but now were laced with silver. He was there the whole time, always present and near. He did not take his eyes off her, was never tempted to turn towards the screen, to see what was happening there. His phone flashed red occasionally, but he did not answer. She felt like a fish that had been caught in a net, and she lay softly against the fine mesh. There was a pile of papers on his desk, and a notepad, where he sometimes scribbled something down with such speed that she wondered if
he wrote shorthand.

  ‘It was embarrassing,’ she whispered. ‘I felt ashamed.’

  She could see that he was considering her answer. That he did not leap to any conclusions. That he certainly seemed to understand her. What would Lars and Gunnhild and all the others have thought about the letter? What would they have said, how would they have reassured her? Other than smile about it, dismiss it as nonsense? They would never understand how much the letter had unsettled her. It must be something about her, they would think, something that had made some malicious soul choose Ragna Riegel, of all people. Point her out, without pity, tip her balance. It was not random, they would think, because nothing frightens people more than randomness. There had to be a reason, or some form of culpability. If they found no reason, no blame, then anything could happen, then any kind of precaution was pointless – hiding, keeping one’s nose clean.

  Ragna observed the inspector thinking. He understood the gravity of the situation, her distress, she could see it in his grey eyes. Not that she had never thought about death. Dear God, she had thought about death. But when she got the letter, she thought about it all the time, from minute to minute. She thought about the envelope that had not been franked. That meant he had driven there, or walked along Kirkelina. He had stopped at her mailbox, stared up at the house, watched for shadows in the window to check if he had been seen. Then he had hurried off into the darkening evening, or night, if it had been night, with his coat collar turned up and his hands deep in his pockets, with a plan, some intention that she could not fathom. She wondered if maybe he had tormented cats when he was a boy. The thought made her shudder.

  ‘Did you think of anyone in particular?’ Sejer asked. ‘Someone you once knew or had a relationship with, or worked with or a neighbour, someone’s toes you may have stepped on, a distant relative?’

  ‘I weigh practically nothing,’ Ragna whispered. ‘If I stepped on anyone’s toes, they wouldn’t notice, no more than they would a mouse.’ She pouted when she said ‘mouse’, and smiled at him.

  ‘You’re certainly not a mouse,’ Sejer said. ‘But there are sensitive souls out there who are offended by the slightest thing. I have to look everywhere, in the past as well. What about Rikard Josef’s father? You haven’t said anything about him yet.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. He would be over seventy now.’

  ‘So you count the years?’

  She felt mortified about everything again. Someone had found her in the multitude and callously turned a spotlight on her, a light she was not able to ignore. The house where she had grown up on Kirkelina, her own little nest that she loved, was now left standing in the autumn dark with all the lights on like an American weatherboard ready for Christmas. She was exposed for all the world to see. Even though she was not guilty of anything, she was convinced that the man who had tormented her had something on her.

  For a brief moment, Sejer caught sight of a kind of defiance, as though she wanted to say to him, I know why I’m sitting here but I don’t want to grovel. And he was not asking her to. They would go through this together, he without judging, and she without losing her dignity. That was what he wanted. It was what Ragna needed.

  ‘Your son,’ Sejer said. ‘Was he the result of a brief relationship?’

  ‘He’s the result of a single night. I was at a party and I drank far too much. Even though I hid myself away in a corner, one person found me. I didn’t dare let any awkward teenage boys near me. But they didn’t want to be near me anyway, I had none of the things they wanted.’

  ‘What do you think they wanted?’

  ‘Don’t ask stupid questions.’

  ‘So,’ Sejer prompted. ‘One night. And then you never saw him again?’

  ‘Oh yes, I did, a couple of times.’

  ‘Do you ever think about him?’

  ‘Very occasionally. But I have a big chest of drawers in my bedroom, and in the bottom drawer is a photograph that he took of me one day when we were walking through the park. A black-and-white photograph that he enlarged and wanted me to keep. He said that I should look at the photograph and know that I had been seen, that I deserved to be seen. I was never beautiful,’ she hastened to say, ‘not even when I was sixteen, but he somehow managed to catch me at a good moment. In a favourable light. No one else had managed that. I look like an angel in that picture.’ After a pause, she added: ‘He’s a photographer.’

  She looked down again, regretted what she had said. She had blown her own trumpet. Saying ‘angel’ was going too far. She blushed violently and did not want to look up again for a good while.

  ‘But the photograph is still in a drawer? Even though it is the most beautiful version of you that you’ve ever seen?’

  ‘The photograph,’ she whispered curtly, ‘is nothing more than pure chance. A slight mist. The setting sun. Things like that.’

  ‘But you haven’t thrown it away. What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Walther Eriksson. He lives in Stockholm, he’s lived there for years. I guess he’s retired now.’

  ‘So you do keep track, all the same?’

  She looked away. He had never seen such a thin neck, you could probably break it with one hand.

  ‘My world is very small,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t have much to do with other people, only those from work. I spend a fair amount of time online, and there’s stuff about him there. He’s won a few prizes for his portraits. No, not a few, a lot.’

  ‘So, a good photographer,’ Sejer said, ‘an excellent one, in fact. Good photographers don’t win prizes because of chance. They have a good eye. A special kind of relationship with their subjects and good timing. They know when to fire.’

  He leaned forward, and said emphatically: ‘Sooner or later, that picture should be hung on the wall.’

  Sometimes he chose to say nothing. Not to create uncertainty, but he did use silence as a tactic. It could trigger a body language that told him something about the person, or they might talk too much, get nervous, and give themselves away. But now it was more a case of giving her space and an opportunity to compose herself. To process and defend the things she had confided in him, things she had never told anyone. When he said nothing, her eyes roamed around the room. She noticed things, the way quiet people do, and because she had problems with communicating, she was a good listener.

  ‘I like Grace Kelly too,’ she whispered, and nodded at a photograph on the wall. ‘I like old American films. They’re buried together, the prince and her, in the palace. There are always flowers on the grave. And there are always people there.’

  Ragna was given one of Sejer’s rarest smiles.

  ‘That’s my wife, Elise. She’s buried too, and there are always flowers on the grave. But there are not many people there, just Frank and me.’

  ‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘But she’s like her. She looks so like her.’

  ‘Everyone says that,’ Sejer replied proudly.

  ‘Oh,’ she whispered again.

  She gazed at the portrait for a while, then looked at Sejer, then back at the portrait. And again she felt ashamed that she had spoken about her own portrait in a way that suggested it was beautiful.

  ‘Elise?’

  He nodded.

  Silence followed. He sat there looking at her nylon work coat; it was far too big, he could barely guess what her figure was like.

  ‘Do you often lose control, Ragna?’ he asked, out of the blue.

  She laughed, a few short breaths.

  ‘Look at me. Listen to my voice. Does it look like it?’

  Her eyes met his, she was surer of him.

  ‘No,’ he had to admit. ‘But you do have that most important of instincts in you – rage. Everyone does. Because at some point or other, we all find ourselves in a situation where we need it. The adrenaline, that is. It makes us strong and fast. Men have it more than women, of course; men have to go out and hunt, they’re the ones most likely to encounter wild animals. But you have a bit too, don�
��t you? That’s why you’re sitting here now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But women have other weapons as well, only they’re not often aware of it, or just what they are capable of. Goodness, Gunnhild at work bought some pepper spray, which she always keeps in her handbag. So in that moment when she’s panicking she has to rummage around in her bag. Get the lid off, aim and hit the mark, while all the time some lunatic is threatening her with a knife.’

  ‘I can see the problem,’ he nodded.

  ‘But there’s something else that will always scare an attacker,’ she continued. ‘Something that all women have. That they don’t need to look for, and yet they always hesitate to use.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘A scream.’

  That reminded him of many cases, many women. A rape could take place in a bedroom while other people were enjoying themselves in the living room. Women had been raped in doorways while people walked past on the street. That paralysing fear. The fear that things might escalate.

  ‘It’s best to keep still. Not to move a finger. It will soon be over.’

  She started to become more aware of people in a different way. She had always thought they were so similar, especially in the autumn. They all dressed the same, whether they were women or men, in down jackets and denim, black, dark blue and anonymous. Teenagers all dressed the same as well, though not as many of them came into Europris, and she was not out on the street much. But now they were no longer a homogenous mass. The troll had always had many heads, and now she could see each one of them.

  She was working the early shift and was on the till. She kept the customers at a distance with a tight smile, but she nodded to the amount displayed on the card terminal, and with her hand on the box of carrier bags, looked up with questioning eyes. No one said anything when they were at the till. And practically no one looked at her either, she was simply part of the card terminal. But now Ragna studied each individual carefully. That is to say, not the women so much, and they were definitely the majority, but all the others, the men, to see if they were sending out signals, something she should notice, that extra something, be it a cryptic smile or disturbed expression. Something special about their body language, an opaque comment, or for that matter, a distinct smell, even though she realised she was no bloodhound. She could smell neither fear nor aggression. But there were no men like that, there was no one who stood out. She did not see anyone who might be the anonymous letter writer, who was maybe out to get her, or to get attention. They were no longer the same, though; despite the down jackets and denim, she saw them clearly now. She saw the subtleties and details. Even the regular customers, the ones she thought she had studied and pigeonholed once and for all, were given another assessment. No, it was none of them. Could a young father looking for a cheap toboggan, with a toddler in tow, be her tormentor? Or an older woman looking for Jamie Oliver’s new frying pan, which normally cost twelve hundred kroner, but they sold for half-price? There’s something I’ve missed, she thought, something I’ve forgotten, something from way back. But she didn’t like to think about the past, she had enough as it was with the present, her head was full of the moment, the sounds and smells, the stream of people, it filled her completely. Everyone said that we only use parts of our brain, hah! She knew better than that. Every single cell was being used, there were no empty pockets in Ragna’s head.