The Whisperer

by Karin Fossum

  ‘There!’ She pointed triumphantly. ‘I’m waving as well, do you see?’

  Sejer remained silent. He was not looking at the screen, he was looking at her.

  ‘Now I’m inside,’ she whispered. ‘Can you see that I’m inside, at reception?’

  She saw herself, standing in the middle of the floor, bewildered, clutching her handbag. She was wearing only a pair of leggings and a thin, short-sleeved blouse.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ Sejer said.

  ‘I’m not wearing very much,’ she admitted. ‘But I left the house in a rush, so it’s not surprising that I’m a bit stressed.’

  She watched the screen closely. The woman moved to the right of the picture, towards some comfy chairs by the wall, where she sat down and put her bag on the chair beside her. She sat there for a long time. With her hands in her lap and staring at the door into the duty officer’s room. There was something helpless about the poor woman, she could see that clearly herself. Was that really what she looked like, so wretched and timid? Was that how other people saw her? The minutes passed. She glanced at the digits in the bottom right-hand corner, two, three, four minutes. The woman stretched out her hand and picked up one of the leaflets from a pile on the table. For a while she sat reading the brochure, looking up every so often.

  ‘What was the leaflet about, Ragna?’ Sejer asked. ‘Can you remember?’

  She thought about it and looked at the screen again.

  ‘I think it was about love.’

  He nodded.

  ‘What did it say about love, Ragna?’

  She struggled to dredge up the memory.

  ‘Something about violence.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sejer said. ‘Real love is free of violence. You were reading a leaflet from the Women’s Shelter.’

  ‘But I’m about to go in and talk to the duty officer now,’ she whispered eagerly. ‘I had forgotten how nervous I was, I had forgotten that I sat there for so long drumming up courage.’

  As soon as the figure stood up, she was fully alert. She was going to file a report now and hand in the message as evidence. But then she realised that the only thing she had in her hand was the leaflet she had been reading from the Women’s Shelter. She crossed the reception area and went in through the glass door to the duty officer, where another camera started to film her, from another angle. Without saying anything, she put the leaflet down on the counter. Real love is free from violence. Then she gave the officer a firm nod and walked out.

  The camera on the outside wall caught her as she left the building. She walked towards the semicircle of stone blocks, then started to walk faster and eventually ran down the street to Irfan’s taxi. The screen went black. Sejer struggled to find the right words in the silence that followed. She had lowered her head, did not want to look him in the eye. Her hands were in her lap. Her narrow shoulders sank in resignation, and even though he could not see her face, he was sure that she was flushed with shame.

  ‘It must have been the skulls from Malaysia that started everything,’ she whispered. ‘The ones that Lars wheeled out into the shop. I put batteries in one of them and the eyes lit up. It was as though they were looking at me, as though they wanted to tell me something.’

  ‘What did they want to tell you?’

  ‘That I was going to die.’

  Chapter 33

  She was sailing on the ocean. The boat was no bigger than the little paddling pool that Rikard Josef had when he was small, and the sail was the size of a tablecloth. There was a mild breeze blowing. She saw no other boats, no people, no masts. She was not concerned about her direction or position as she bobbed peacefully towards the horizon where the sun was shining gold. But she never got there, the sun changed colour to peach then pink and red. The light started to fade. The night fell and it got colder. In the dark, she heard the seagulls that would no doubt eat her if she drifted for too long. And when they had pecked her to pieces, the lack of beauty she had always lived with would no longer be a problem. She had been told that they went for your eyes first. But then daylight came again, and she saw some mountains in the distance, great blue and purple mountains. The little boat drifted in the right direction and she sat on her knees with a hand shadowing her eyes. Soon she saw the cliffs and the white surf. The rocks were so sharp and jagged that the little boat would be torn to shreds. She closed her eyes and prepared herself for the impact, raising her arms for protection. She curled up in the bottom of the boat and waited.

  She had been asleep for a hundred years or more, or so it felt. She had been to another country, another continent, another dimension, a world she could not enter or leave as she pleased, it was just there. The medicine she had been prescribed, once the experts had confirmed that she had lost her mind, and the doctors had concluded she was suffering from a hereditary mental illness, was the same that her father had taken all those years ago. There were a number of unpleasant side effects that she recognised from her father’s complaints – he had often refused to take the pills, to her mother’s despair. Her mouth was so dry that it was sometimes hard to make herself understood. Her head was full of cotton wool, and not much else. When she moved it was as though she was stuck, as though something was pulling her back. Her peripheral vision was reduced, but she could see clearly straight ahead. And when she tried to free her thoughts, when she needed to escape, she could not find the white beaches, or deep green forests. She struggled to link her mind with words and images, and was quickly exhausted. Too often, she gave up and sat in a shapeless fog.

  She knew that she had to write to her son and tell him the truth. Or what the police claimed was the truth. But she had no idea why she should trust them, why they had stripped her of her credibility. And they would disappear out of her life soon enough. She would be left alone with a diagnosis as destructive as a wrecking ball. They said she had inherited the mental illness from her father. That she had been ill for a long time. That she had never been terrorised, that there was no stalker, that she had never asked the police for help. This terrified her so much that she clung on to her own version for dear life, for fear she would stop breathing. The Agent had come to her house to offer her a place in Paradise. They said that was his only errand. But only she had looked him in the eye and heard his voice. You are going to die.

  Ragna always woke up early in the morning, and was given her medicine in her cell, in a little plastic cup. She had to swallow the pills while the officer watched: Zyprexa morning, noon and night. It was humiliating. Her father had said that Zyprexa could kill you, he had heard of several cases. But she did not mention it. But she got into the habit of studying the officer closely while he or she waited for the empty cup.

  They had robbed her of her life. They had forced another reality onto her that she did not want. She cried a lot in the period that followed. Did madness provide some form of mitigation – what sort of reasoning was that? She found it incomprehensible. She wanted to take responsibility, she wanted to serve her time. She was no longer friendly to the prison guards, and peered at them with narrowed eyes, as she saw more clearly then. She seldom spoke, and sat by the window for hours, keeping watch on the light, making sure it behaved as it should, that the sun rose and set at the right time. She had to accept their awful claim: that what she had seen did not exist, and what she had heard had only happened in her head. But she could not. She was, of course, exhausted after a long autumn of terror; she had balanced on a knife edge and seen signs of her tormentor everywhere, and her desperation had given rise to some strange thoughts. It happens when people are under a lot of pressure. But madness was something else. In a sudden flash, she remembered sitting in the kitchen beside the body, waving at the smoke alarm. The memory made the blood rush to her cheeks. She stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over. No one waves to their smoke alarms – why had she done that? Then she pulled herself together again. Fine. It was perhaps a little over the top to accuse the authorities of surveillance, but she was suff
ering from lack of sleep – it affects your mind, and you see things everywhere. The next thing that popped up in her memory was the sound of the Agent’s hand when he knocked on the door. The feeling she had at that moment: he is here now. I have known he would be for a long time. It was almost a relief when he followed her into the kitchen and they stood there face-to-face. He was a person of flesh and blood, not a ghost, not something she had imagined. And then he had repeated the same message, only spoken this time. She remembered rummaging around in the drawer, her hand between the spoons and rolling pins and ladles. She wanted to assert herself once and for all.

  She sat on the bunk with her face in her hands and recalled every single second. His eyes, so astonished. His nervous hands that were itching to open the folder and show her the truth.

  She let this torrent of memories pour over her, tried to accept them one by one, tried to see them in a new light. In her mind, she composed the letter she wanted to write to her son, where she told him everything. What would he think, what would he believe? It would not lead to anything positive. He may even fear that he had inherited the illness. He would never come home now, he would think she was contagious, that she too would die sitting down with a cable round her neck, as his grandfather had done, the blood gathered like ink stains at the bottom of his body. In all these years, she had received nothing from him except a few mean cards, and yet he had always been near. And now, after the event, he was even closer than before. If she wrote the letter she wanted to write, she would frighten him away forever. All he would feel when he thought of his mother was shame and horror. He would deny her existence, never mention her to others, not even the prison priest. My mother, he would say, no, I have no contact with her, nor do I care what she does.

  Ragna cried again, tasted the salt in her mouth, felt desperately sorry for herself. She looked around the cell for an escape. The first thing she spotted was the green metal cupboard, with an even more solid steel handle. Then she looked over to the window and the multicoloured curtains made from a coarse material that would be impossible to tear. Her nylon shop coat would not work either, and she did not have any shoelaces or a belt. She reached out to check the quality of the sheet, but it was synthetic, they had thought of everything. All this talk of the truth as something bright and pure. She had to adjust to it now, bow down to it, grovel. A defiant rage surged through her and she decided to write to Berlin anyway, to give him her version of the autumn’s events and then the police version, which was not the same as hers. Her crime in all its horror. The fear and anger. The admission of guilt, which they now wanted to deny her, which they thought she did not need to assume, because she was ill. They believed they were saving her, and clearly did not understand her sincerity, her future. All doors would be closed when people read her papers, when it was written there in black and white – what medication she had to take, what it did to her head and body. They had cast a different light on everything that had happened. The only part that was real was the murder. Bennet slid down from the chair, slowly like a doll, first his head dropped, then his arms, and finally his feet gave way, as he floundered for something to hold on to and found the table leg.

  She chewed on the pencil for a long time, as she used to do when she was a child. The wood softened and had that peculiar taste that she liked so much. Then she wrote with determination, word after word. And as she wrote, she felt calmer. This was a hugely important project. There was nothing left to lose when your reason had been taken from you. According to the doctor, the medication would keep her in the real world where everyone else lived. The chemicals would, in effect, stop any attempts to escape to another reality, she would see the same things as everyone else, hear the same things as everyone else. They would strip her to the bone in court, revealing everything about her behaviour over the years, and various other events. The newspapers, she wrote, would devour her like vultures, as though she were already a corpse, contaminated by something that stained her whole family. She underlined certain words, or she scribbled them out and found better, more precise formulations. She dried her tears. She wrote faster, she worked herself up into a sweat. As she progressed, she remembered her father, everything he had said, and now she understood it all. Ragna, he had said, you must always be the master of your own life. That is what Ragna means, goddess or master. You must never let anyone force another reality onto you. You are one of the gifted. You are one of those who can see where we are going.

  And yet here she was, she had surrendered to them. They had shown the evidence. They were many and she was one. She cried again. Then she thought about the seven billion people living in the world, who went to bed at night and dreamed secret dreams in secret places. People were only together for brief moments in time.

  The police would read this letter before they sent it on to Plötzensee Prison. She did not care. She would not see their faces as they read it, would not hear their thoughts and what they said to each other. She wrote page after page. Do you remember the time …? My face was always so warm, I thought it was a fever. I stayed indoors a lot, I was afraid of the sun, I burnt so easily, and I was scared for you too, you had inherited my white skin. Red hair. Every time my cheeks got hot I thought it was a fever, that I had an infection and that it had gone to my head. There were so many signs. I interpreted them as well as I could, and interpreted them wrong.

  I apologise a thousand times over.

  She paused every now and then to gaze out of the window. She searched for something to rest her eyes on, a bird, or a fluffy cloud drifting by, or a treetop blowing in the wind. When she felt she had told him everything – thoughts, words, deeds – she pondered on how to finish this long letter. She feared it would be the last. She did not expect him to reply, she did not dare to believe that he would accept her crime and her madness. He would pull back, slam the door, deny her forever.

  My dear Rikard,

  I value you so much. If you deny yourself a child, you will never be able to experience the love I have for you. You wrote that you do not want your blood to run in anyone else’s veins, but there are no guarantees when it comes to children. Your child might be sickly or healthy, he or she might live a long life, or die young. A child can be your pride and joy or your greatest anguish. You cannot control these things. Life has its surprises for us all. Here I sit in a cell, but I have been blessed with a healthy son. My blood does run in your veins, but only the good blood, and I am good. If only you remember these words, and reflect on them in rare moments, I can ask for nothing more.

  Your devoted mother

  Chapter 34

  She had confessed and pleaded guilty, on the basis of the doctors’ assessment of her mental health. She had described her crime in very few words, but in enough detail; her head was clearer now, something had been released. The cell seemed bigger than eight square metres. She felt the great door of truth had been opened. But the signs were still there, the connections she had seen – they forced their way in, whether she wanted to see them or not. The messages, the forgotten watch, the Jumper who did not get up from the ground, but lay bleeding from his mouth and ears. The Agent who had hammered on the door and wanted to come in, who had talked of an imminent death, which would prove to be his own. There was a connection, a logic. Or was it all random, was everything in life random? Forces from above and below pulled and tugged at her, each championing their own agenda. The brain always looks for a pattern, she thought. It either finds what it is looking for, or makes it up, as she had done. The prosecuting authorities wanted to replace her version with their own. This is reality they said, come here.

  She lay down on the bunk and, when she eventually fell asleep, dreamt that she was standing on the roof of a tall building and wanted to jump. Rikard Josef was on the street below, waving at her. Without a moment’s hesitation, she dived, opened out her arms and felt as though she were floating. It went on forever. It was not so strange that people jumped, not so strange that many chose another way. She woke wit
h a jolt before she knew if anyone was there to catch her. No, she was falling too fast, no one was strong enough to catch her. Louise came in and picked up the letter, which was of course not sealed, as they still had to read it. With her eyes, she followed the white envelope as it left her cell. With her mind, she followed her confession, the long, detailed letter full of sorrow, regret and anger, all the way from her cell to Berlin.

  Chapter 35

  ‘Have you sent the letter?’ she whispered. ‘I hope it’s not been left on a shelf somewhere, under a pile of paper, and won’t get there until summer, it’s happened before. I’m asking, because I haven’t had a reply, and days are passing. How long do you think it takes for a letter to get from here to Germany?’

  ‘Three or four days, I reckon,’ Sejer replied. ‘Yes, Ragna, we have sent the letter. It was franked and put in the tray for outgoing post, and it’s no longer there. Rikard will have received your letter a while ago, but you have to give him time.’

  ‘I will have to believe you,’ she whispered bravely.

  She poured herself a glass of water.

  ‘I had problems sleeping last night,’ she said. ‘Do you know what I was thinking about?’

  ‘Tell me,’ Sejer said.

  ‘I lay awake thinking about Joan of Arc.’

  ‘The Maid of Orleans. Why were you thinking about her?’

  ‘She was burned at the stake,’ Ragna explained. ‘And now I’m going through the fire too.’