The knocking became more distinct. He put his ear to the crack, could hear someone shouting.
– Wait, he shouted back. – I’ll go and get a key.
Sigurd sees Katja in his mind’s eye. She’s lying on the bed, the whole of her face bathed in the afternoon light that falls from the window.
I don’t want to hear you say that, he repeats.
But she says it once more, those three words.
It’ll pass, he protests. It always passes.
She slowly shakes her head, a smile around her lips. He can never make her smile that way. Nor anyone else. Then her face dissolves into light, and all that’s left of her are the words, like an echo.
I love you, Sigurd Woods. No matter what you do.
He thought he saw Gothenburg 108 on a sign. The rain had stopped. There was something about the movement of the brown clouds. Then the warning arrows were there, detour, cones and flashing lights. Overalls said something to the woman. She shook her head, remained silent. He said it again; it sounded like a question. Then she pointed, and he followed the line of cars leaving the motorway.
The car in front had Norwegian number plates and three kayaks on the roof. It moved forward a few metres; they jerked along behind it. Further ahead, a roadblock. The two of them discussing something in low voices, the woman pressed up against Sigurd. It was her sweat he had smelled; it penetrated his insides, the smell of meat gone bad.
Sigurd gets to choose, since he won.
Sigurd looks at the two balloons for a while. They’re pink, with rabbit ears. About to point to one of them, let Trym have the lion that shines gold and silver in the summer sun.
Three police cars a little further ahead, one of them blocking the road. Four uniformed policemen in yellow jackets, one holding an automatic. Silence inside the car. Sigurd could no longer feel his fingers. His wrists were two throbbing bundles. The woman covered him with a blanket, wrapped him in it. The smell of her sweat even stronger now, mixed with the vomit from the seats, and again he had trouble breathing. – You know what to do, she whispered in his ear. – Not a single fucking thing.
He felt the barrel of the gun in the hollow of his neck.
– Shut your mouth, don’t move your lips.
Like some wounded animal he lay beneath the thick blanket, closed his eyes, saw nothing, opened them, saw nothing. The car crawled forward, stopped, moved another few metres, stopped.
He heard the window glide down.
Overalls’ voice: – What’s going on?
Could drag himself away now, throw off the blanket. Manage to call out before she fired.
The beam of a torch coming through the blanket.
– Pull in to the side here.
Overalls got the car moving, it gave a leap as he put his foot down. Someone shouted, the shout cut off by the racing of the engine, a loud noise as they ran into something, then reversed, turned and drove off in another direction. A booming sound in his ear, the gun going off, another quick turn, then a crashing up through the gearbox, his face thrown against the back of the seat. Sirens behind them, getting closer, then fading. He lay with his face squashed against the leather of the seat, the woman’s fist pressing into his back. She screamed something to the driver; his foot went down even harder.
Slowly the skies seemed to clear. Light through the grey, the sun waiting, everything that had yet to happen waiting out there. In the darkness beneath the blanket he imagined the road, the hill up between the cuttings, had studied them so many times, layer upon layer of stone in shades of grey, but with one layer of pink that glistened in the low evening sun. He used to think of it as a wedge in the cutting, an opening in the rock, a gateway to something on the other side. All the places he would never get to see.
Silence in the car once more. Only the sound of the engine and the tyres on the wet asphalt. And somewhere above them, a helicopter.
I’ll see the bridge first.
He could see the landscape just the way it had looked that time in the evening sun.
Wanna bet?
What’s the point, you always cheat.
No I don’t.
The mast with the blinking red light appears. From there he can start to count, knows exactly when to shout out that he can see the bridge, just before the white towers and the cables come into view. Trym can never catch him out.
You’re right, Trym, I cheated. I’ve always cheated.
Around the corner is the bridge, like a ship in the evening sun, ready to set sail.
You’ll both get a helium balloon when we reach Liseberg, says Ivar.
What’s the point of betting, if everyone wins?
An explosion beneath his ear, and the car started to spin as the air rushed from the tyres, spinning faster and faster in a spiral. The woman screamed, as though it was still an option to give orders, as though it was the car she was trying to command with her scream.
Sigurd stretches out a hand, chooses the lion balloon in silver and gold. Runs off with it across the grass. I’ll let go of it. I’ll let go of it deliberately. That’s what I’ll do.
I want it to disappear.
EPILOGUE
In other words, it is very important to have a clear understanding of what is at stake in this matter. As we know, the woman we are discussing here, Lydia Reinertsen, formerly Ludmilla Golubeva, is a Russian citizen. After she sought refuge in the Russian Embassy on 19 June, there have been initiatives on several levels to have her interviewed by the Norwegian police. At an early stage in proceedings, the Foreign Department was involved. Formal charges were made against the woman, and the material evidence presented to the Russian authorities can only be described as conclusive, leaving little room for doubt that she has been involved in serious criminal activities, several of which have resulted in deaths. So far all attempts to have her extradited have failed. She is claiming diplomatic immunity, and maintains that in the light of the extensive media interest in her case and the atmosphere this has created around it, she would find it impossible to get a fair and unprejudiced trial in a Norwegian court of law. The Russian authorities are not prepared to contest this claim, and there are no indications that they intend to hand her over. However, agreement has been reached with the embassy for a Norwegian forensic psychiatrist to conduct a series of four meetings of specific duration with Lydia Reinertsen, on the grounds that the woman has suffered an apparently extreme psychological response to the events, and to the charges against her. These psychiatric consultations have been conducted as planned, and at a meeting with top-level Russian representatives early today, plans for a preliminary police interview with Golubeva on Russian diplomatic territory were discussed. We have reason to believe that this is a first step towards allowing the Norwegian police to conduct formal interviews with the suspect.
From a Police Security Service memorandum, 4 August 2104
You say you are fully aware of the charges being made against you?
I’ve followed the case. Newspapers and TV. And on the internet.
What are your grounds for believing you will not receive a fair trial in the Norwegian courts?
Because this has become a political case.
We can assure you that we shall stick to the facts in this conversation and keep politics out of it. Let’s start by recapitulating some of what the investigation has so far revealed. You are of course at liberty to correct and supplement these findings as we go along.
(Accused confers with her lawyer. Interview suspended for two minutes.)
On 13 June, you were on duty in the gynaecological department of Akershus University Hospital. Is that correct?
I have already said I do not propose to comment on any of your claims.
At 22.10 that evening, a patient named Ibro Hakanovic was admitted to the hospital’s emergency unit after being attacked in a fight. Following an examination, it was decided that he be admitted to a surgical ward. In the meantime, he was moved to another examination room. In this room, one of
your patients had just undergone treatment. You entered the room to see this patient, who was no longer there. This is how you found yourself standing next to Ibro Hakanovic’s bed. He at once recognised you, having previously met you on several occasions at a reception centre for traumatised women in the town of Kladanica, in Bosnia, in February 1993. At that time your name was Ludmilla Golubeva, and you were working at a women’s clinic in the town. At the same time you were participating in a programme designed to limit the fertility of female members of the Muslim population of Bosnia.
This is a lie.
We are familiar with a number of scholarly articles on the subject written by you and published in Serbian journals. We also have a number of statements from witnesses identifying you as a member of a team carrying out operations of a so-called experimental nature on Bosnian women. As a result of these operations, a number of women died, among them Iram Hakanovic, the sister of Ibro Hakanovic.
I refuse to sit here and listen to this.
(Interview suspended for fifteen minutes. After conferring with her lawyer, the accused returns to the room.)
Then we shall continue. In the days before the negotiated ceasefire in Bosnia, a female doctor with the same name as yours – that is, Ludmilla Golubeva – was allegedly killed in a road accident in the south of Serbia. She appears in photographs in newspaper reports and bears a striking resemblance to you. We believe that as the war in Bosnia drew to a close, you were given assistance to disappear, and reappear in St Petersburg, now under the name of Lidija Petrova. According to your papers, you were born in Novgorod and studied in Moscow and St Petersburg, where you were living until you met the Norwegian psychiatrist Knut Reinertsen. You married him and moved to Norway. Whereas the allegedly deceased Ludmilla Golubeva grew up in a small village in Bakorstostan in the former Soviet Union and studied medicine in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia. We can prove with some certainty that Lidija Petrova, later Lydia Reinertsen, and Ludmilla Golubeva are one and the same person. This would also seem to be confirmed by a childhood story you told the forensic psychiatrist with whom you spoke last week.
I was in a terrible state that day. I might have said anything.
Then let us move on. We have here a list of numbers you called from your phone. One of these is to a phone found in the car in which Sigurd Woods Plåterud was abducted.
I knew that he was Jenny’s son. I didn’t want anything to happen to him.
You know who owned that phone?
No comment.
It appears to have belonged to a woman living in Oslo, married to a driver at the Russian Embassy. She spoke fluent Norwegian, as well as several other languages.
I know nothing about her.
How is it that you had that number and were able to ring her in the middle of a hostage-taking situation?
There’s no need for me to answer that.
This same woman can be traced to at least two places in Germany in which murders were committed.
I know nothing about that. You’ll have to ask her.
As you know, it is too late for that. Let us instead return to the evening of 13 June, earlier this year, at the hospital. We have a witness who came into the examination room, one of the porters. He saw you inject something into the saline drip to which Ibro Hakanovic was connected. Our investigations show that this must have been a large dose of morphine. You have earlier explained that this was done so that Hakanovic could be removed from the hospital without being hurt. If your motive was to treat him as gently and considerately as possible, then surely professional killers were not the optimal choice of collaborators?
I had no idea who was coming to fetch the patient.
And yet you had the telephone number of one of them?
I have withdrawn my previous statement. I was being pressurised.
Most of what you have told us can be documented. And we have formed a detailed picture of the subsequent chain of events. The murder of Ibro Hakanovic solved one problem, but two new ones arose.
Are you trying to get me to join in this guessing game?
The porter who had seen you giving the morphine to Hakanovic had to be eliminated. It did not go according to plan. The woman he was with that day was killed, but he got away.
I’m tired of all these accusations.
In the second place, you and your helpers had to get rid of a friend of Hakanovic’s. He called her from the hospital and left a message on her voicemail. The perpetrators had reason to believe that she was in possession of documents that would incriminate you.
Why should I have to sit here and listen to this?
Because we still have a number of unanswered questions. We’ll have answers to some of them over the next few days. The others may prove a little more difficult. The simplest solution would be if you helped us.
I have no reason to help you.
We have asked ourselves why an operation of this magnitude was mounted in order to cover up for you. Yes, you risk being accused of war crimes, but we’re talking about offences that took place over twenty years ago and that will be difficult to prove.
That just shows how insubstantial your case is.
That’s probably not true. The evidence connecting you to the murder cases we’re investigating is incontrovertible. The question is, who is behind it all? Who has the means to mount an operation on this scale? And above all, who has a strong enough motive. It may well be in your own best interests if you can give us some answers.
What do you know about it? You have no idea what you’re talking about. You have no idea what will happen if I reveal even a fraction of what I actually know.
(Interrupted by her lawyer. Interview terminated.)
Interview report, 10 August 2014
This was the third time Jennifer had been interviewed. Or the fourth. She couldn’t bear the effort it took thinking back to tell them apart.
She had slept more over these past few summer weeks than for a long time. Not at night, when she twisted and turned or got up and wandered like a sleepwalker around the little flat, from room to room. She slept during the days. Usually sitting in a chair, bathed in the summer light that never ceased streaming down over her. She had abandoned all hope of protecting herself against it.
But there was something different about the interview this time. It wasn’t to take place in Lillestrøm, like the first one, or in the offices of the NCIS in Bryn, like the second. The woman who called asked her to attend at the headquarters of the Police Security Service in Nydalen. Jennifer gathered whatever strength she had, readied herself to go through the sequence of events yet again. Of course she understood why it was necessary to uncover all the details, to clear up as far as possible anything that might cast doubt on the story they were painstakingly piecing together. And with her rational side she understood that she had to do what she could to assist in this. But not even the most detailed recounting of what she knew could change what had happened. And that was all she really wanted.
She drove herself in. Shouldn’t have. Not in her state, with her body pumped full of sedatives. But she took the car, and no one thought of asking her if that was a good idea.
The first part of the interview was like the previous ones. What happened that day she entered Zoran’s flat, how she got in, how she found Zoran. The woman asking the questions was wearing a dark grey trouser suit. She was about Jennifer’s own age, maybe a few years younger, her hair cut short and streaked with grey.
After a while, a man took over. He sat in the chair furthest from the window, wearing a grey suit too, as though the pair of them had agreed on matching outfits. The interview took a different direction. He asked about other things. Why it was she had come to Norway, the jobs she’d had, what aspects of medicine interested her in particular. Her impression was that he had a specific reason for asking these questions, but she let him get on with it.
– How long have you been involved in the research being conducted by Lydia Reinertsen?
�
�� About a year.
– You’ve played a central part in the project.
That wasn’t correct; her feeling the whole time had been that she was working on the periphery.
– But you were one of the group leaders.
– Lydia wanted me to take on more of the administrative duties.
– Did you have full knowledge of what the others in the group were doing?
– Not at all.
– Would you say it is normal for a leader not to know the potential uses to which a project might be put?
Jennifer shook her head slowly. – I don’t understand the question.
– Who have you communicated with about the work?
– Communicated?
– Who have you shared the information with?
– No one apart from those working on the project. I was supposed to be co-writer of an article on some of the findings. It never got to that stage.
– So you have not sent data from this research to anyone outside the group?
She felt herself waking up slightly.
– What are you asking me?
The woman poured her more coffee.
– We’ll be open with you, Jennifer, she said.
– Open? About what?
– We’ve examined the computer in your office. Large quantities of data have been extracted from it. A number of files transferred to external hard disks.
Jennifer blinked in confusion. – What does that imply?
The woman leaned across the table, as though about to share a confidence.
– We believe that this research project has an open side, to which the majority of the researchers have contributed in good faith.
– But?
– But that it had another side too, one that not everyone knew about.
– Has Lydia been fabricating the results?
– That we don’t know. But this is about something more than a simple falsifying of results.
Jennifer felt her jaw drop. – You’re going to have to help me out here.
The man in the grey suit began to explain. It occurred to her that even his facial expressions were like the woman’s, as though they were brother and sister, or a married couple who had lived together for years. She recognised that this was the way her mind had been working in the weeks since it all happened. People became similar, hard to tell apart, as though they glided around her in a mist, different editions of the same person, without inner lives.
Certain Signs that You are Dead Page 35