– How’s the eye?
Liss gave a slight shrug. – They’re going to take another look at it before they let me go. They don’t know yet.
Jennifer sat down on the edge of the bed. – Have you spoken to anyone … about what happened?
Liss made a face. – Some bloke doing a psychiatric survey was here. A complete nerd. I turned him down as politely as I could, and that seemed to make him happy.
Jennifer had to smile. – Anyone else? Your mother, or your stepfather?
– They do the best they can. My mother needs help more than I do.
In the pale light of the lamp Liss’s face was a faded grey oval beneath the bandage. Jennifer felt like stroking a hand across her hair.
– The detective chief inspector came by. The one named Viken. He wanted answers to a few questions.
– They’ll probably have to interview you, Jennifer nodded. – Even if your doctors say as much rest as possible.
– It took them almost ten hours to find him.
– I heard that.
Jennifer had carried out the autopsy on Viljam Vogt-Nielsen after he was brought up from under the ice, but she didn’t want to say anything about that.
– Do you think he suffered?
– No, Jennifer said firmly, adding: – He lost consciousness before he hit the water. He must have hit his head on a rock when he fell.
Liss sat a while staring out of the window.
– I pushed him. I heard his head crack against the outcrop. But I ran away. It sounded as if she was rebuking herself.
– That’s why you’re sitting here today, Jennifer protested.
Liss began twisting a lock of hair around her index finger. – And because the detective chief inspector decided they should come out to the cabin. He realised Viljam might be there.
It didn’t surprise Jennifer to hear that Viken had made it obvious who Liss could thank for having been found.
– I’ve killed someone.
Jennifer got up and stood beside the chair. – Dear Liss, she said as she touched her shoulder. – I’m not a psychologist, but it’s normal to feel that way after going through such an awful experience. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. I recommend that you talk to someone about this. Not all shrinks are nerds, after all.
After Jennifer Plåterud had gone, Liss lay thinking for a while about what she had said. Did she need to talk to a psychologist? When Chief Inspector Viken had been there, she had kept it together as much as she could so that she could tell him what had happened down by Morr Water. It had helped her. The chief inspector too claimed that the primary motive for his visit was to see how she was getting along. But he didn’t protest at all when she started telling him what she knew.
– He followed Mailin to the post office. He waited for her in the car outside and went with her to the cabin. How he managed to make it look as if he was in Oslo the whole time I have no idea.
– I can help you there, said Viken. – He came home in the evening to work, and then returned to the cabin afterwards. He must have held her captive there that night and then driven her to the factory early on the morning of the eleventh.
– Was that when he filmed her? The date on the video was the twelfth. She thought about it. – It isn’t difficult to change the date on a mobile.
Viken gave a wry smile. – Your deductions are good. I don’t think there’s much wrong with your head, even if it was frozen for a while.
She liked his tone, straightforward and no fake sympathy.
– He must have sent the message to Berger from her telephone, she said. – And probably several others. Keep Midsummer’s Day free next year. – Did he kill Jim Harris too?
– We have reason to believe he did, Viken confirmed. – Harris saw something he shouldn’t have seen.
– He was at Mailin’s office that afternoon … The car. He saw Viljam parking her car.
– Exactly. It was only later that he realised what it meant. I’m guessing he tried to make a little money from what he’d found out. Everyone has to live off something.
– But Viljam was at lectures the whole of Thursday, and then on the Justice Bus.
Viken pushed the upright chair back and stretched his fairly short legs. – We’ve been through the security camera pictures from the Ibsen car park and seen Mailin’s car on its way in in the morning. When Viljam had a break from the Justice Bus, he had time both to shop at Deli de Luca and move the car up to Welhavens Street. It’s not difficult, he wouldn’t have needed much time.
Liss realised she was sitting there twisting and twisting at a lock of hair. She let her hand fall to the armrest.
– I found something out, she said. – Viljam was sexually abused. He met Berger on a holiday in Greece when he was twelve years old.
Viken raised his eyebrows.
She told him about the CD Mailin had sent her, repeated what she could recall of the document’s contents. The inspector listened without interrupting her. Sitting there in the chair by the window of the hospital room, he seemed less insistent. Less threatening.
– Jacket was the nickname Viljam used for Berger.
– If you’re right about this, Viken exclaimed, – that fills in quite a lot of important blanks for us. If Viljam was twelve years old, it might have been 1996. He didn’t say the name of the place?
– I think in Mailin’s document it said Crete.
Viken seemed energised now; he took out a piece of paper and made a note. – Is it possible that there are other CDs? he wanted to know.
– Viljam destroyed the one Mailin sent me. He destroyed everything Mailin wrote. He and Jacket swore an oath together. They swore to die before they would tell the world about the two of them. Mailin couldn’t be allowed to live because she found out who Jacket was.
– And yet Berger’s plan was to name Viljam as the killer, live on television? That was what he implied in that story in VG.
Liss recalled what Viljam had said about that.
– He got Berger to believe that he was going to confess to the murder on Taboo.
Viken rubbed two fingers over his clean-shaven chin as she finished her story.
– Berger must have lost the few powers of judgement he still had left, he observed. – This business of some kind of pact is still not clear to me, but if what you say is true, it would explain why he admitted Viljam to his apartment. We can only guess exactly what happened. But we found traces of … well, the two of them engaged in sexual activity in that apartment just before Berger died of an overdose of heroin.
Liss didn’t feel the need to hear any more about that.
– That girl in Bergen, she said instead. – Ylva Richter. Why did Viljam seek her out more than seven years after the holiday in Crete? Had he been in touch with her in the meantime?
Viken spread his hands. – We’ll have to wait for the rest of the investigation to see if we find an answer to that. And anyway, certain things we just have to live with without understanding them.
There are a lot of things we have to live with, Liss thought once Viken stood up to leave. Waking up that day in hospital, it occurred to her that she had paid her debt. She had come face to face with death but been spared. In the days that followed, sitting and looking out of the window with her one good eye, that feeling had gradually diminished. Because what sort of calculation was that? Was it supposed to mean something for Zako, or his family, that she herself had very nearly been killed?
For a moment, as Viken stood with his hand on the doorknob, she was on the point of blurting out everything that had happened in Bloemstraat. She opened her mouth, but in that same second changed her mind. Don’t tell anyone. Carry it alone. Live alone.
One of the nurses came in. She knocked as she was closing the door behind her.
– Got everything you need, Liss?
She said her name as though they were old friends meeting again. Actually she was an auxiliary nurse. A bit chubby and sharp eyed, but friendly enough in
her professional way.
Liss wasn’t hungry, and she didn’t need a stranger’s hand to hold. But there was something she did need.
A few moments later the nurse was back, and placed a pen and a little notebook on the bedside table.
She sits high above the ground, head almost in the clouds. She’s holding his long hair, like reins, but she’s not in charge of what happens, and suddenly she’s thrown down and comes sailing through the air towards the ground at a terrific pace. Just before she’s smashed to pieces, she is caught in an enormous pair of hands. They lift her up on to the shoulders again. She shrieks and pleads with him to stop, but again she is thrown down, flies through the air, is caught. It happens over and over again, until the point comes where all she wants is for it to go on for ever.
I should have written that in the book you gave me, Mailin. And not a word about what happened that night in Amsterdam. Because that isn’t where it began. All stories begin somewhere else. By Morr Water, maybe, or in a house in Lørenskog, long before I was born. This is the way to carry it with me: write about it without saying a word. What happened, and what could have happened, what brought something else in its wake, shadows within shadows, rings around rings. A finger dipped in the water moves round. Somewhere down in the cold darkness I am born.
The telephone on the wall rang. She recognised the nurse’s voice.
– I’ve got your boyfriend on the line, shall I put him through?
Liss screwed up her one good eye, then had to laugh. – I don’t have a boyfriend.
– Well that’s what he said when I asked.
The nurse didn’t seem to understand, but without pursuing the matter further she put the call through. Liss was not surprised to hear Jomar’s voice at the other end.
– Is this what you call the gift of cheek? she grunted. – When did you become my boyfriend?
She heard him grin. – It was the nurse’s idea. I just let her get on with it. Let people believe what they want. That usually works.
– And what makes you think I might want to talk to you?
– I have to know how you are.
She was sitting there in a worn tracksuit Tage had brought her from the house. The legs were too short and the colour was something she liked when she was about sixteen. She was unwashed, wearing no make-up, and wrapped in a bandage that covered half her face.
– Well at least don’t even think about coming here, she said, exasperated. – I’m sitting here like a one-eyed troll.
– Okay, I’ll leave it till tomorrow.
– I’m being discharged tomorrow.
– I can come and fetch you. Drive you home.
Where might that be? She realised she didn’t have anywhere to go.
– You do remember, don’t you, everything I said to you on the phone that night?
– Every single word, he assured her.
– That is how I am, Jomar Vindheim. I like you, but there can never, ever be anything more between you and me.
– You already said that eleven times. Can you hear me yawning? The noise he made into the receiver sounded more like snoring.
– I didn’t bring anything here with me, she interrupted. – So I don’t need to be picked up.
After hanging up, she wrote in her notebook:
But there is one person who could take hearing about what happened in Bloemstraat. Someone who can tell me what to do. Maybe he’s the one person in the world you trusted most, Mailin.
Wednesday 21 January
THE DOOR TO Dahlstrøm’s office was locked. Liss knocked, waited; nothing happened. She walked round the corner, past the garage, up to the stairs to the main entrance. The doorbell was in the form of a miniature relief depicting a landscape. The button itself was between a pair of peaks stretching up into a dark sky. She heard two deep notes sound inside the building. At the same moment the door opened. The girl standing there couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. Her hair hung down her back in two thick dark braids.
– Your name is Liss, she said.
Liss had to admit she was right about that.
– Did you lose your eye? the little girl wanted to know. She was wearing a pink padded jacket and a pair of boots and looked as if she was on her way out.
– Not completely, Liss replied as she walked in. – And I see you have lost a front tooth.
– Yeah, but what does that matter, a new one’ll come. The girl opened her mouth and pointed to a white outline that was just about visible through the gums. – I’ve lost eight teeth, she explained, guiding Liss around her mouth as she went through them.
– But you lost your sister, she asserted once she was finished.
Liss realised that Dahlstrøm had told his daughter about her.
– I don’t know what your name is.
– Elisabeth, the girl replied. It was strange to hear that frail little voice pronounce the name.
– That was my grandmother’s name too, said Liss. – That’s funny.
– Is it so funny? the little girl said, rolling her eyes. – I know this girl in 2b who’s called that. Plus a teacher. Plus Mum’s aunt.
Tormod Dahlstrøm appeared in the hallway.
– Liss, he said, not surprised, because he knew of course that she was coming, but it seemed to her that he was pleased to see her. She didn’t like it when people she hardly knew hugged her, but if he had done so she would have let him.
He turned to the little girl.
– Remember to look both ways before you cross the road, Betty. With a worried look he stroked her hair.
His daughter sighed. – Daddy, you’ve told me that a hundred times!
Liss couldn’t help smiling.
– Yes, I probably have, Dahlstrøm conceded, gathering the two braids in his hand. The bands that fastened them at the ends were decorated with ladybirds, one yellow and one red. – Don’t forget to wear a hat. There’s a terrible wind blowing.
Once the little girl had run off down the driveway, he took Liss’s leather jacket and hung it behind a curtain next to the mirror in the spacious hallway.
– I’ve got the house to myself for a couple of hours. Let’s go up into the living room.
Liss was glad they wouldn’t be sitting in his office; it made her feel more like a guest and less like a patient.
He let her go up the stairs ahead of him. There was an open fire at the far end of the room.
– Do you want anything to eat with it? he asked when he arrived with the coffee. – Not even a piece of Belgian chocolate?
He said it in a teasing way, she thought, and for a moment she wondered if he was testing her, noting the way she declined, coming to his own conclusions about her attitude towards food. She felt as if she was revealing herself the whole time. Astonishingly enough, it didn’t make her irritable.
– What did the doctor say about your eye? He peered at the bandage.
– They don’t know yet. They think I’ll keep my sight. But it’ll never be as good as it was before.
He nodded, didn’t try to comfort her. – What about all the other things that happened?
The other things? Did he mean the rope that was tightened around her neck? Viljam’s face as he was strangling her?
– I want to talk to you about something else, she said. – Viljam was destroyed on the inside. He came to Mailin for help. She seduced him.
Dahlstrøm sat there looking at her. The eyes widened slightly, but even now he still didn’t seem surprised.
– You knew that, she exclaimed.
He settled into the high-backed chair. The eyes were deep-set beneath the forehead. The gaze from within them made her feel calm. Was there nothing that made him uneasy? She knew there was. She had heard the slight fear in his voice as he said goodbye to his daughter. Her name was Elisabeth, and there was a road full of cars she had to cross.
– During several of our counselling meetings a couple of years back, Mailin talked about a patient she was particularl
y worried about, he said. – It was clear that he was very badly damaged.
– Viljam was abused by Berger from the age of twelve. Mailin sent me a CD with a record of the conversations she had with him that time he came to see her.
– A CD? This is something you should talk to the police about, Liss.
– I’ve already told them. But when I called Viljam, he got me to tell him where it was. He destroyed it. He seemed obsessed by the idea that no one should know about him and Jacket – that was the name he called Berger.
– But Mailin might have made other copies.
Liss picked up a chocolate from the little rose-patterned plate. – I’m certain Viljam destroyed them all. Or else the police would have found them.
Dahlstrøm crossed one leg over the other, rubbed the hollow in the bridge of his nose with a finger. – He can’t have seen Mailin more than three or four times before she suddenly decided to end the treatment. I asked if he’d threatened her. Her reply was evasive. And then I realised what was happening.
Suddenly Liss felt a terrible anger. – Exactly what she wrote about. That people get abused. Children who need tenderness and care, who open themselves and are met with desire and abused. He went to see Mailin because he felt so fucking bad. She was supposed to help and ended up sleeping with him instead. Fucking hell!
She tore the paper off the chocolate and bit it in half, squeezed the soft centre between her tongue and her palate.
– Mailin ended the treatment immediately, she said once she had calmed down. – It would have been considered a crime if she hadn’t gone on seeing him. And the moment she broke up with him, he could have reported her and had her convicted. Maybe she would have been barred from practising for life. You read about shits like that in the papers. How could she have done such a thing?
Dahlstrøm looked to be thinking long and hard about what she said, yet he never seemed to lose touch with her.
– You know, even the best of us are capable of mistakes, he said at last. – Serious ones sometimes. We’ll never know what went on in her office. I think the best thing is to just drop it.
Death By Water Page 41
