by Geir Tangen
André Ferkingstad sat down on one of the herring barrels right across from Viljar. Demanded answers. It was like opening a floodgate. Viljar talked and talked. Didn’t conceal anything. Described what he’d been thinking. What he’d done. Why he’d made the choices he had. The whole time with the certain knowledge that this was probably the last chance to tell it the way it really was.
As the details of the story slowly unfolded, the gaze of the old man softened. What was hard and hateful disappeared. Only the mournful expression remained on his face. Perhaps he understood that this had also marked Viljar for life. A fatal misjudgment, which had destroyed life for so many. Viljar remembered everything that happened. He could recall the smells. Hear the sounds. Even relived the intoxicating feeling he’d had from the praise before it all fell apart. Before it unraveled.
Viljar had been negligent in his work, and the consequence was that two young people were torn out of time. Two others were in prison. Viljar had gotten off too easy. But the very worst was the thought that he had indirectly taken the life of an innocent nine-year-old girl. It was her blood he felt he had on his hands.
In the time after the Jonas case, the desire to write, investigate, and expose disappeared. Anxiety tore him to pieces, and the scoop journalist gradually became a shadow of himself. Allowed to stay on the job based on mercy and old achievements. Burned out, tired, and with no drive.
He had always expected that the fateful error would come out in the media storm that arose. That he would be exposed and put up against the wall. First by colleagues in the Oslo press who had discovered the oversight—but they had placed their protective hand over him. Next he expected that local gossip would catch up with him. That sooner or later, Johan Øveraas would call him into his office. It was a mystery, but the confrontation never came. Not even during the trial of Jonas’s mother.
In her testimony, she had touched on the revelation several times, but what was behind Jonas’s desperate choices those last few days never came out.
Viljar fooled himself into thinking that he was the only one who knew that he was the cause of the tragic deaths. Not even Jonas’s father knew it. At least that was what he’d believed until now. Then the whole thing ended in an inferno of even more death and suffering. He had confronted André Ferkingstad about the madness of killing other people simply to get at him. Asked him why. What was the purpose of all this violence?
Then suddenly the table turned.… Ferkingstad looked at him with gentle eyes and said the words that made Viljar’s framework of logic and context collapse.
“It wasn’t me. I’m no killer. Don’t you see that? I should kill the one person that I’ve hated more than anything on earth the past four years, and I couldn’t even manage that. I have God’s light in me, Gudmundsson. I cannot kill.”
“But then who is it who…? This must have something to do with Jonas and me?”
Once again, Ferkingstad looked at him with steady calm. Made room for the silence.
“No, Viljar, as far as I can see, none of those killed have any connection to Jonas. This is a product of your guilty conscience, nothing else. Isn’t it perhaps time that you turn your face toward God and pray for forgiveness? Perhaps then you will have peace from your demons.”
Viljar suddenly collapsed in tears. From exhaustion. From relief. From regret.
* * *
André Ferkingstad had gradually learned to live with the sorrow, the loss, and the shame. He had come to terms with the fact that Viljar made a professional error that he couldn’t be blamed for. That the regret and conviction about what had happened were punishment enough. That the shame in itself was a lesson. For four years, this was something he had come to accept. On Friday, that changed. Then he read Viljar’s bantering reportage in consternation, where he made fun of his own contact with a simple murderer. A journalist who very clearly hadn’t learned anything from what happened to Jonas and Ine.
It was at that moment André Ferkingstad decided that Viljar Ravn Gudmundsson himself should feel what it was like to be a victim. He wanted to see Viljar suffer. See him feel regret. After striking him down and securing him in the boathouse by his cabin on Røvær, he actually thought about killing him.
It wasn’t until he saw how despondent the journalist was that he settled down. Viljar was, like himself, a marked man. He himself had lost everything. His children were dead; his beloved wife was in prison. All he had left was a congregation that clearly claimed its distance from all that had happened. He was a wounded animal, but no killer.
Without any more words, they got in the boat and silently chugged back to the city in the belief that everything that had happened between them went unnoticed.
Requiem: Agnus Dei
I see them standing there, all together. My characters, all lined up. What they’re doing here on the breakwater, I don’t know, but I have an idea that they must have known something. One way or another, they’ve figured out what is happening, but I don’t understand how. No one but me has access to all the details. There is only one possible solution, and that is that they’ve seen me and know my identity. That someone is shadowing me. Following my movements. But then why don’t they stop me? Why do they let me commit more murders? That would be madness, right?
It can’t be that way. They may have had suspicions, but they can’t possibly have known. It wasn’t quite according to the notes that the police should come to Lindøy, but even so, they did. I was only minutes away from being caught. Perhaps they noticed the boat and followed its journey toward land? But then they should have stayed hidden and waited for me here! Not stood there echoing each other right out in the open as if they were on an outing. Was it my little stop at the pier on Litlasund that confused them? Was it the case that they really did wait for me, but now the operation ended because I should have been on land long ago if I sailed straight to the Bakarøy breakwater? Yes, that’s probably how it was.
It was a rare stroke of luck that I swept the area with the binoculars before I took off on the last stretch in toward land. If not, it would have stopped here. The masterwork would have been unfinished.
There is a shiver down my spine. That must not happen! For everything in the world, that must not happen. Fortunately, they know nothing about what is coming. Requiem: Communio. The final movement. Now it’s all about staying out of sight. They evidently know who I am, but not what I’m doing.
When the police leave, it’s crucial to be careful. I can’t risk anything now. They’ve gotten too close. I must find another way to a different place. With dawning curiosity, I turn my gaze the opposite way. Toward the island group that is bobbing on the surface of the water to the northwest. Espevær.
No one will suspect a boat on its way out there. From there, I can operate in peace. No police will look in that direction. I can prepare the finale leisurely. The only problem is the manuscript. I look down in the red backpack. All I need is on the laptop computer. It will take a whole night to rewrite it, but it will be worth it. So far everything tallies. There have been fewer rewrites than I feared. I need a space with electricity and a bed. The little island community out there has that, and I know exactly where I can get the peace I require to complete what is waiting tomorrow.
Under cover of the skerries, I set out from the boathouse and point the boat toward Espevær. The night sky is coal black, and the sea is dead calm. The calm before the storm.
Haugesund Police Station
Sunday night, October 19, 2014
Olav Scheldrup Hansen looked over at Lotte Skeisvoll where she sat with her head in her hands.
“Are you joking with me? Gudmundsson denied that he’d been kidnapped?”
Lotte Skeisvoll mumbled a “Yes, why is that?” down into her coffee cup. She did not raise her eyes. When there was no response from the Kripos investigator, she sighed and explained the whole thing to him.
“It seems our dear friend Viljar Ravn Gudmundsson has been on a daylong fishing trip with his ‘new
friend’ André Ferkingstad. He picked Viljar up at home on Saturday night, and they’ve been blissfully unaware out there on the island. That Viljar was both bloody and injured was from a nasty fall on the slippery rocks.”
Scheldrup Hansen shook his head. This was as believable as a Russian professional cyclist with clean blood tests. He let it go. The killer must have been in another boat in any case, which in some peculiar way or other, they’d managed to let slip between their fingers. How that happened, only God must know. Now, however, they had more important things to focus on than Gudmundsson’s fairy tales.
Lotte had come to life again, and she stood up from the chair.
“We have to know who the incinerated corpse on Lindøy is, because it’s not Gudmundsson.”
She’d been saying such things for two hours now. Truisms and empty phrases. She had Harald Madsen copy the last forty-five pages of the manuscript for the team, and they’d all read it. There was no doubt about what was going on, but they had one night at their disposal if the killer stuck to the text. Nothing would happen before early tomorrow morning, but then on the other hand, it would happen incredibly fast.
Scheldrup Hansen looked at the others on the team. Worn-out, broken-down faces. They let themselves be influenced by a leader who had more or less given up. He decided to take hold of the situation and stood up abruptly. The chair scraped behind him and made a loud, piercing sound. He had their attention from the first second, so it was actually superfluous to clear his throat loudly and say that he wanted to say something. No one nodded or smiled. Only vacant or skeptical gazes were seen.
“Listen here … It’s leading us nowhere to sit and stare down at the tabletop. Even if the maniac obviously didn’t follow the plan by coming ashore at the breakwater, that doesn’t mean he’s discovered that we know about his plans. He may have changed them a little in the approach. Don’t forget that he wrote this years ago. Nevertheless, he has tried all along to stay close to the original manuscript. The guy must have uncommonly good intuition or insight into how police think. We’ll have to hope and believe that he hasn’t changed too much.”
Scheldrup Hansen stopped briefly. Took a slurp from his coffee cup before he again let his gaze sweep across the gathering. He could see some of the faces had woken up. Lotte too. She sent him a grateful look from her seat at the end of the table. Lars Stople showed with a finger in the air that he wanted to say something.
“In that case, the manuscript shows whom we have to bring in protection for. We’ve received the last email, and we’ve all read what it involves in the manuscript. An awful scene where Lotte’s head is found on a stake up by the outdoor café at Haraldsvang. I assume that we’ll keep guard over her here, so he doesn’t get ahold of her?”
Olav nodded, but looked thoughtfully at his colleague beside him. “Yes, of course we have to protect her, but we mustn’t forget either that the author has failed seriously at one point in his predictions.”
He looked around and could see for the first time some who were humming and smiling around the table. Lotte, on the other hand, hid her reddening cheeks in her hands. Some levity was created amidst all the tragedy in that the manuscript described a passionate love scene between Lotte and Viljar right before he disappeared from the story. That the scene referred to a number of kinky details didn’t make matters any better for Lotte. Olav Scheldrup Hansen could see that if she’d had a sinkhole available, she would happily have made herself disappear. He continued before anyone got a chance to comment.
“That’s not important in this instance, but what that scene shows is that we’re dealing with a person. A person who makes mistakes. Who thinks wrong. Not a psychic divinity who knows all. But at the same time, the simple fact that we know how he’s going to act is our only trump card. If he starts to improvise, we’re through. It will be even worse if he isn’t able to track down Lotte tomorrow. Then he will undoubtedly become both desperate and unpredictable. Then we will lose the slight advantage we have.”
All attention was directed toward Scheldrup Hansen now. What he said made sense, but at the same time was so unheard of that it was on the edge of being pure madness.
Lotte raised her head and looked him right in the eyes. “Are you insinuating that I shouldn’t have protection? Use me as a kind of decoy? Put my life at risk? It’s not enough that police regulations strictly prohibit this, it’s also completely indefensible.”
The Kripos investigator sighed. He knew he was on very thin ice now, but collected himself to explain what he’d been thinking.
“The answer is both yes and no, Lotte. We can let you be apparently unprotected. We know both where and how the killer intends to strike at you. We have a pack of police officers ready at every conceivable corner so that we can strike so quickly, the killer won’t know what’s going on before he is overpowered. Then we’ll manage to avoid the whole tragic scene he wants to play out in Haraldsvang an hour later.”
Everyone’s eyes turned toward Lotte. When all was said and done, this decision was hers. They knew that.
She held both arms up in front of her. “You know … the arrangement is pure systematized madness, but this will have to be the police chief’s decision. If he’s in agreement with you, Olav, then I’ll back down. I just hope you’ve thought through the consequences better this time. You’ve already calculated his thoughts and actions wrong on more than a few occasions.”
Austmannavegen, Haugesund
Monday morning, October 20, 2014
Lotte Skeisvoll was no coward by nature, but now she was scared. If this case had proved anything the past week, it was that this killer was capable of surprise every single time the police thought they would get the better of him. For that reason, she had also tried to protest when the police chief hesitantly went along with Scheldrup Hansen’s hypothesis.
It was only when she got the police chief face-to-face and he explained what made him give in that she realized she couldn’t say no. One thing was that everything about this guy showed that he always had a plan B if the main one failed. In plain terms, that meant that if he didn’t attack Lotte, he would find another woman to take her place. They didn’t know who that would be, but it was someone the killer definitely already had in reserve. A woman they could not possibly protect. Another thing was that purely tactically, this was the last possibility they had to take him out. After this scene, the manuscript was almost unusable, as it didn’t give the reader any information about where the killer would be before it was too late to intervene.
Lotte probably seemed much more confident on the outside than she was inside. Even though it was a mild autumn morning, she felt cold, and her legs were shaking as she jogged on her regular route, the way she did every morning from six to seven. An hour of asphalt before the city woke up was the closest she came to comprehending the dependency that her sister Anne talked about. She still had a short stretch left before she reached what the author had pointed out in the manuscript as the scene of the crime. The underpass at the Opel Building just west of the high-rises where Viljar lived.
Lotte had done as she was asked. Left her apartment in Ramsdalen at the usual six o’clock, the way she always did. The run was such a transparent routine that the killer had written it down years ago. She had to honestly admit that she hadn’t changed her behavior pattern noticeably. People could set their watches by her, and today they were literally doing just that.
Down by the underpass, she knew that it was apparently deserted. But it wasn’t. A total of ten police officers were placed in the area around the tunnel, and they could probably both locate and take out the killer long before she herself arrived. If not, they would be ready regardless as soon as the man had intervened and taken her with him. According to the manuscript, it would happen by the entrance to the tunnel, and the killer would do it by knocking her out with an electric stun gun, and then carry her with him the ten meters up to a parked car by Opel. Now they knew this, however, and for that reason, the arres
t itself didn’t involve any great risk, Olav thought. Even if it went so far that the killer used the stun gun, a bruise would be all Lotte needed to be afraid of.
All this was fine. Lotte understood the logic. The problem was that this man had fooled them completely so many times now that she didn’t feel the least bit secure as she was running. In case the whole thing broke down, she had been supplied with a can of powerful pepper spray in one pocket.
In principle, this self-defense measure was probably meant to make Lotte more confident, but it had the exact opposite effect on her. It meant, of course, that the police chief had a gap in his theories; this could go wrong. The thought was worrisome, but the assurance that at least ten pairs of eyes would be following her on her way into the little tunnel helped, and was the very reason she had chosen to go along with the plan. She had seen enough examples of the response force’s enormous effectiveness previously.
Her heart rate increased as she crossed the road by the nearest high-rises. The tunnel was fifty meters farther ahead. It was a matter of seconds. Lotte took herself by the scruff of the neck. Didn’t want to seem uncertain and hesitant. She jogged nimbly toward the opening while her gaze searched across the area. Farther ahead, she could see the figure who stood and waited. The adrenaline pumped through her body, and she noticed that her legs threatened to buckle under her. The outline of the figure in the tunnel got sharper and sharper. A recognizable figure. Lotte knew who was standing there, but she couldn’t believe it was true. The person in question had hardly been in the crosshairs through the entire investigation. In astonishment, she ran the final steps toward the man while she surreptitiously stuck one hand into her pocket to take out the pepper spray. The man had a broad, self-satisfied smile as she came up to him, but only for a fraction of a second. Just as Lotte reached him, all hell broke loose around them.
