by Gard Sveen
Bergmann studied the remnants of the fingerprint powder that lingered on the doorbells. He didn’t even know why they bothered. He stood here, thought Bergmann. With a bag or a suitcase, or maybe a backpack. He must have kept his tools—the knife, the hammer, and the duct tape—hidden somewhere.
They had searched for a man early this morning—one who they had captured on a surveillance camera walking up Cort Adelers Gate, away from Porte des Senses toward Drammensveien—but he had no bag, suitcase, or backpack. Perhaps he simply lived in the vicinity. Maybe it wasn’t the perpetrator at all.
He pushed open the door and started back up the five flights of stairs. What did someone think who went up such a stairway, carrying a knife and a hammer and a roll of sturdy duct tape?
Bergmann remembered the semihysterical voice of the caller. A young man, he thought. Her pimp, or perhaps an errand boy who was supposed to pick up her money for the big boys. So this kid showed up in the middle of the night, perhaps he took a cut for himself by sleeping with her; every jerk outdid the last in the prostitution industry. Regardless of who the caller had been, he had arrived unannounced. Either the door was open, or the person in question had their own key.
The young man must have gotten the shock of his life when he walked into the apartment. Bergmann couldn’t bear to think about what he’d seen for long.
But he also could have seen the perpetrator. He must have. Bergmann had listened to the audio log at least ten times that morning: “Hurry up, you have to hurry up. She’s dying. She’s dying!”
The call was registered at 3:47 a.m. It came from a phone with an unregistered prepaid card, which might mean that the caller was somehow connected to the girl. The voice had no accent. He was clearly not Eastern European.
The call didn’t give Bergmann much to go on, but it could mean that there were two people who had seen the perpetrator. That said, they couldn’t protect the caller if he didn’t report himself. But he’d probably gotten out of there faster than hell. There were bloody tracks out in the hallway, which suggested that the man had followed him.
But the girl was still alive. She was their gold now.
He stopped on the fourth-floor landing. The young couple who lived there had already been questioned. They hadn’t heard a thing—which was perhaps not so strange considering that the girl’s mouth was taped shut. They had also firmly denied knowing anything about the type of operation that went on above their heads. He’d nonetheless felt that the young newlywed and mother of a small child had wanted to tell him something more.
He decided to ring their bell. But before he pressed the doorbell, his phone rang. Halgeir Sørvaag announced that he would leave Oslo University Hospital immediately if Bergmann didn’t come and relieve him. He was too old to work for free, he said.
Bergmann hurried back down the stairs. He’d have to talk to the couple in the apartment tomorrow.
If the girl in the hospital woke up, one of them had to be there. It was their only chance.
5
She woke up to the sound of someone calling her name. The room said nothing to her. She’d dreamt about her again. That she went upstairs to the second floor of her house in Skøyenbrynet. Half-muffled sounds could be heard across the dark passage. The two of them in her bed. The scream.
Where are you, mother?
I’m here, Kristiane. So far away, like I always was.
The usual disappointment washed over her. It was Peter’s young voice from out in the kitchen.
“Mom?”
“I’m resting,” she whispered. She didn’t have the energy to shout. After a while he appeared in the doorway. He entered the room and turned on the reading lamp.
“Why are you lying down here in the office?”
“Get me a glass of water,” she said. “Will you?”
He turned around without a word. Closed the door. She knew that he’d understood for a long time that she didn’t have any more love to give. She knew that he’d probably started to despise her for something he couldn’t even put into words.
Her head felt heavy as she got up. She could have taken a valium or two, but wanted to wait. The weak light from the reading lamp cut deep into her skull, down into the spine and out into the small of her back.
Her hands trembled as she picked up the Dagbladet off the desk. She’d heard the news in the taxi from the Radisson hotel. When she got home, she sent Rose out to buy all the papers. Reluctantly she had sat down and spent half the day reading news websites.
The police want to contact this man, it said. There was a grainy picture of a man in a black coat crossing Cort Adelers Gate in the direction of Drammensveien. His face was hidden by a NY Yankees baseball cap.
The picture had been taken at 1:59 a.m.
She knew that he went to clubs down the street. She used to get turned on by the thought. And the cap. He wore that kind of cap at the cabin. Sometimes in the city as well.
When had he come to the Radisson hotel?
She barely remembered. She hadn’t gotten home before nine o’clock. Rose said that Peter hadn’t asked about where she was. That morning, Rose had woken him as she usually did, made breakfast, and packed his lunch. Once in a great while Elisabeth Thorstensen got up and drove him to school herself, but only if the weather was bad or she wanted to feel like a normal mother. Normal? Normal mothers don’t think that way about their twelve-year-old son: I had you to forget.
And now I hate you.
Shut up, she said to herself. She heard Rose and Peter talking together out in the kitchen. She laughed at something he said, in a way that suggested she might be a bit taken with him. A thirty-year-old Filipina housekeeper charmed by a twelve-year-old boy. There were days when Elisabeth wasn’t sure if Asgeir was even Peter’s father. Peter resembled Alex. One accident triggered by another.
One day I’m going to cut you, she thought. Really cut you.
Her eyes were filled with tears.
Don’t grow bitter. Wasn’t that what she’d been told? Bitterness would only lead you into the abyss.
Would that be so wrong?
Just to let go.
6
By the time the taxi finally stopped in front of Oslo University Hospital, a thick layer of snow covered the ground. Bergmann had ended up with a Dane behind the wheel. He’d never experienced snow in November, even though he was from Hjørring. “Welcome to Norway,” Bergmann had said. The Dane had driven so slowly that the prostitute might have died on their way to the hospital. But getting a ride in a police car was out of the question. Though only a dozen people at headquarters knew which hospital the girl was in, that was already too many in Bergmann’s opinion.
The sound of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme stopped abruptly as Bergmann slammed the car door shut. He watched the Mercedes’s red taillights until they faded in the blowing snow, which had a sickly yellow cast in the glow of the streetlights.
He considered it a miracle that the EMTs and the ER doctors had managed to keep her alive all night. She’d been on the operating table for nine consecutive hours, and Bergmann prayed to a god he no longer believed in that she would soon be able to talk.
It must mean something that she’d come out of this with her life intact.
He allowed himself two cigarettes outside the entrance. He didn’t know how long he would be in there.
The reception area was empty as the sliding glass doors closed behind him. No one sat behind the front desk, but he heard subdued laughter coming from inside the nurses’ office just beyond it. White lamella curtains blocked the view into the room—and, he assumed, the view out. He turned and studied the ceiling and walls. The only visible cameras were the two positioned over the sliding doors. They each covered a sector of the reception area, but once you headed down one of the long corridors to the right or left, you would be out of sight of the camera lenses.
There were plenty of stories of junkies who wandered down hospital corridors in search of morphine and anything els
e they could get their hands on. That they hadn’t considered this with regard to the young girl was more than Bergmann could understand. It would only take one unfaithful employee at the hospital for the truth about the girl’s location to end up on the front page of the city’s newspapers. If that happened, even a guard in the reception area and a policeman outside her room wouldn’t be enough.
“Hello,” he called out toward the nurses’ office. The laughter subsided.
A young woman stuck her head out. She looked embarrassed for a moment, but appeared to recover quickly. A guard appeared behind her.
Her expression turned serious, and Bergmann wondered whether she and the guard thought that he was the murderer who’d come to finish what he’d started.
“Is this the way you keep an eye on things?” said Bergmann.
“No, we’re keeping watch,” said the guard as he walked around the counter and started patrolling the lobby.
You’re wasting my time, thought Bergmann, but he said nothing.
He scanned the large reception area and studied the small compact guard as he walked toward the entrance doors. If the man who killed these girls shows up here, you’ll be dead too.
7
He headed down the long corridor, and instead of taking the elevator up to the third floor, he took the stairs. Midway up, a bad feeling came over him. He leaned over the railing and looked down toward the basement, where the orderlies wheeled patients from one ward to another. The dead were taken to refrigerated storage down there, and pathologists sliced into murder victims—with the blessing of the prosecutor. Hadn’t they suffered enough already?
Bergmann stood for quite a long time staring through the narrow rectangular opening into the basement. How long had he been inside the hospital? And he’d only encountered two people—the nurse and the security guard. How many other entrances did a hospital like this have? The whole arrangement was dangerous, wasn’t it?
The murderer knew that the young prostitute was so badly injured that the police were unlikely to take the chance of transporting her any farther than necessary. And if he was familiar with the hospital system, he knew that Oslo University Hospital was the safest place to take a badly injured girl of unknown identity.
Bergmann had tried to convince Reuter that Oslo University Hospital was too obvious, but his words had fallen on deaf ears. Increased staffing was also out of the question. There was no budget for it, and Reuter couldn’t work magic.
A door slammed behind him, but when he turned around no one was there.
He heard a door being opened farther down the corridor, and a male nurse appeared. He walked toward Bergmann, extending his hand.
“Kristian,” he said, but Bergmann didn’t really register his name, and he didn’t think he said his.
A woman’s voice buzzed in his head. At first he couldn’t place it. Then it came to him.
It’s all my fault.
So many years ago.
The doors leading into intensive care opened automatically. The walls were ash gray, as if they’d seen too much sorrow and death.
“She’s at the far end,” said Kristian.
“Okay,” said Bergmann. He’d already spotted the armed uniformed officer sitting outside the door at the far end of the corridor. Halgeir Sørvaag stood before the officer, holding forth about one thing or another.
Bergmann didn’t like Sørvaag, but he was a capable bastard, he would give him that. He was the one who’d found a matchbox from Porte des Senses back at the apartment on Frognerveien. Milovic, the gangster who ran the place, had been promised amnesty by Chief Public Prosecutor Svein Finneland if he cooperated. They figured she was probably one of his girls, who’d been brought to the country in a container, and surely no more than fourteen years old. But Finneland didn’t give a damn about that. He wanted to get hold of the man who’d committed the murders Rask was convicted of. He was convinced it was the same man. Bergmann was not equally certain.
He greeted the men and showed his ID to the uniformed officer, a burly man from Majorstua police station.
Sørvaag took his leave with a couple of grunts.
“You should have one in the chamber,” Sørvaag said to the uniformed officer, then smiled to himself.
Idiot, thought Bergmann. But he had a point. In an encounter with what might be the country’s most dangerous man, you only got one shot.
“She’s in here,” Kristian said, as if Bergmann still hadn’t realized that.
He looked in through the safety glass. The room was darkened, apart from a faint light at the far end where the girl lay in her bed. How old could she be?
“I want to go in and see her,” he said.
“I think that—”
“You heard what I said.” Bergmann turned toward Kristian and jabbed him with his index finger. The uniformed officer stood up tentatively.
“And you sit down,” Bergmann said to him. “I’m not the one you should be on the lookout for.”
“But—”
“Get hold of the doctor on duty, Kristian. Otherwise I may make a few calls around town, do you understand? And then I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever work in this city again.”
Kristian returned only a minute later with a woman about Bergmann’s age, though it was possible she’d already turned forty. He thought he’d seen her before, on a previous case, but couldn’t remember which one.
“I would really like to see her.”
The doctor’s gaze moved past him toward the room where the young girl lay.
“She’s very weak. We’re probably going to put her in an induced coma, but you may already know that. We’ve been evaluating her closely; the last hour has been better.”
Two nurses appeared in the doorway to the nurses’ station.
“Isn’t anyone in there with her?”
“We’re registering the slightest movement,” the doctor said, looking straight at him now.
“Even if she talks?”
She nodded.
“Has she talked?”
“Yes. Somewhat. Incoherently. The policeman who was here today couldn’t make anything of it. And, I must repeat, she is very, very weak. She’s practically hovering between life and death. She lost a critical amount of blood, even though she—”
“Someone should be sitting with her at all times.” Bergmann didn’t have time to listen to this doctor. In situations such as this one, every word was crucial. He would give anything at all for a scrap of information. He pulled a voice-recognition Dictaphone out of his pocket and held it up to the doctor.
“It will be this or me.”
After several minutes, the doctor finally gave in, though due to the danger of infection, he would have to put on shoe protectors, a hairnet, a mouth mask, and the same green coat as the doctor. The doctor said flat out that she didn’t want to lose her because of an unwashed policeman with a cold. In her condition, even the slightest infection could kill her.
Bergmann studied himself in the mirror in the nurses’ office. The room smelled sterile, and the poster advertising the wine raffle next to the mirror seemed completely out of place. His mind flitted to Hege, for whom this was commonplace, who stood like this every day. He wondered whether he would ever get over her.
He put on the hairnet and leaned toward the mirror. In the harsh light there seemed to be no end to the circles around his eyes. He took hold of the mask and thought that the girl would surely die of shock if she woke up and he was the first thing she saw. He felt a moment of panic at the thought of sitting by her side for two or three hours, desperately hoping that she would wake up and say something definitive.
If that could lead to justice, then it would be worth it.
The doctor led him in silence back to the room. Bergmann exchanged a few words with the uniformed officer. Though he was a big burly man, Bergmann knew that nothing would stop the perpetrator once he got there.
He was led into the room. The girl lay in a big hospital bed. He’d ne
ver seen anything like it before. He tried to count how many hoses she was connected to, but grew lightheaded at the sight of her. She wore an oxygen mask over her mouth, and a wobbly hose linked it to the oxygen supply behind the bed. The EKG machine gave off a green glow. He followed the numbers and diagrams with his eyes. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie he’d seen a few years before—the title of which he couldn’t remember—where half-dead girls lay in a kind of comatose state and predicted murders before they were committed.
That was how he felt just then. That he could predict everything that was going to happen. He knew why the attempt had been made on the girl’s life. And he knew that he was the only one who could find the man who’d done it. Because Rask was still in prison, and because Rask had given the interview in Dagbladet three weeks ago, in which he said that perhaps he hadn’t killed Kristiane after all. The five others, yes, but not Kristiane. Maybe not.
When the doctor left, he nearly collapsed into the chair by the side of the bed. He studied the girl’s face, feature by feature. In the weak light, she looked vaguely Slavic, and he was sure for a moment that she was just like the girl in his dream, the girl with the doll-like face. Her skin was white, drained of color, almost transparent.
Her head jerked. Bergmann jumped back in the chair.
Her eyeballs started moving beneath her thin eyelids. Her mouth opened slightly, and his gaze flew to the EKG on the other side of the bed. Her pulse had risen, her blood pressure too.
Suddenly it was over, as quickly as it had begun. She stopped moving, her pulse fell, she exhaled heavily and then fell back in what seemed like a quiet morphine-induced state of calm.
The door opened behind him, and the doctor cast a long shadow across the floor. She studied Bergmann and the girl a moment, then went over to the EKG machine. She cocked her head, pressed a button, and a few seconds later a printout emerged from a printer alongside the apparatus.