Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  “Did she say anything?” she said, turning toward Bergmann.

  He shook his head.

  “She’s had some similar awakenings over the course of the day. Yes, she woke up for a minute or so earlier, but it was impossible to make contact with her.”

  That’s why I’m sitting here, thought Bergmann, but he merely nodded in response.

  The doctor bent over the girl and placed her hand gently on her forehead. He followed the movements of her long fingers, the broad wedding ring on the ring finger, as they stroked the girl’s light hair.

  “She’s not much older than my middle daughter.” The doctor smiled sadly at him, as if there was nothing she could do other than stroke the half-dead girl’s hair and pray to higher powers that she would survive.

  “You look like you could use some sleep,” she said, patting him lightly on the shoulder. Several minutes after she’d left, he still felt the warmth from her hand.

  He had an almost irresistible urge to take the girl’s hand and hold it. He felt his eyes getting moist, then chastised himself for being a sentimental pig. He closed his eyes and touched the little hand carefully, so that he didn’t touch the cannula.

  After half an hour he felt his own breathing fall into the same rhythm as the girl’s. A couple of hours later, he fell asleep on the chair. He was wakened by the doctor, who was crouched in front of him with her hands on his shoulders.

  “Let’s find a room for you,” she said.

  He barely remembered being transported to a bed in a vacant two-person room. The last thing he saw were white snowflakes against the window, as they melted and trickled down the glass.

  8

  The music from the first act of Swan Lake always made him so damned sentimental. It was as if Tchaikovsky knew exactly which buttons to push. The melodramatic first scene, followed by the two waltzes that reminded him of a time that he would never get back, when his daughters were little and went to ballet school and appeared in Christmas performances. That was before he became a consultant and clinical director. Before craziness became his career.

  Arne Furuberget picked up the remote control and turned off the music. He’d had his legs on the desk for so long that the blood had left his feet. With great effort he got them down to the floor. His legs tingled painfully for a long time, until the blood returned. He wondered what it would be like to wake up in a straitjacket.

  Furuberget started walking in circles in the dim office; only the green library lamp indicated that there was still life in the office so late in the evening. He took a deep breath and tried once again to shake off the feelings of guilt, working up a certain professional distance to his personal life. He strode over to the CD player and put the Russian music back on. Then he poured himself a straight vodka and stood by the windows that faced toward Lake Mjøsa. He drained his glass in one gulp and reminded himself that there were no breath tests in this place. A few lights in the courtyards below the clinic were all he could see between the sheets of sleet. Otherwise it was pitch black out there.

  He heard a faint scream some place above him. No one else would have heard it, but he had developed a sixth sense for these almost supersonic outbursts from patients.

  As if by intuition, he called the nurse on duty.

  “Are you still at work?” she said.

  He didn’t reply.

  “What do you think about increasing the dosage?”

  He liked to query the foot soldiers. It made them feel a little more important than they were. No, he thought. They were important. More important than he was, weren’t they? They were the ones who were in the trenches twenty-four hours a day. Not him. As a rule he went home at four o’clock. He would arrive the following morning and read the reports and case records, see some of the patients for therapy, and look over the protocols the various teams worked by.

  The nurse told Furuberget what he already knew—that it was Johansen, the accountant from Kirkenær, shouting on the floor above. His psychosis was intensifying, and evenings were worse than mornings. Always muttering something about wolves wanting to kill him, he lived in a kind of parallel universe.

  They agreed that Johansen’s current dose of Trilafon was sufficient. Although Furuberget knew that an increase wouldn’t do him any harm, he nonetheless decided to wait. Johansen was as far beyond cognitive therapy as you could get. Maybe after Christmas, if higher powers cooperated.

  “We can revisit the situation after Christmas,” Furuberget mumbled, then smiled dejectedly at his own pessimism. He’d just seen this situation far too many times before. Once a patient was as lost in his own mind as Johansen was, there was almost never a way back.

  He looked at the clock on the wall. It was starting to get late, and he fleetingly regretted having come back to work after leaving for an early dinner with his wife. While she was in the middle of an after-dinner nap, he’d suddenly felt compelled to return to Ringvoll.

  The feeling that he’d made an irreparable mistake would simply not go away. Furuberget knew perfectly well that he had encouraged Anders Rask to have the conviction in the Kristiane case taken up again. Rask had said as much, just as suddenly as he had admitted to the murders many years ago: “I wasn’t the one who killed Kristiane.”

  And now an attempt had been made to murder a new girl in the same manner. He’d confirmed the perpetrator’s method with his old rival and colleague, the psychologist Rune Flatanger, who worked with the Criminal Police. The only detail that had been lacking was the cutting off of the little finger on the girl’s right hand, but the perpetrator probably just didn’t have time. Although Furuberget and Flatanger had disagreed about many things over the years, Flatanger had given him the information he needed. The community was small enough that they had to help each other, especially where Anders Rask was concerned.

  The thought—or more correctly, the gut feeling—was unavoidable: if Furuberget had rejected Rask’s indirect plea for help reopening the case earlier in the year, the girl would not be hovering on the brink of death today. Only one thought was worse, which was what compelled him to come back that evening. Had Rask made a fool of him? And even worse: Did Rask have contact with someone on the outside? Someone who planned to help him finish what he had started in 1978?

  He sat down at his computer and printed out Anders Rask’s correspondence from the past year. Furuberget personally read all the letters that were sent to the thirty patients on the maximum-security ward, out of concern for both their own mental health and the society they might one day return to. On rare occasions he would let a letter be sent on to the patient. The most monstrous rapists and killers—each one more psychotic and schizophrenic than the last—received mail weekly, not only from people who hated them and threatened their lives, but also from women who would do anything at all for them.

  The women provided both their address and telephone number. For many of the inmates, this information could prove to be much too great a temptation, or compulsion if you will, when they got out. The admirers may have been signing their own death sentence without knowing it. That said, the majority of the patients on the ward would never have a chance to execute the crimes they dreamed of committing against these women. They were simply so sick that their lives would end behind the hospital’s barbed-wire fence.

  But Anders Rask had always been a mystery. And his many years in the ward had not made him any less mysterious. Strictly speaking, nothing about his conduct inside the walls of the hospital suggested that he would remain there indefinitely. His violent fantasies had largely subsided in recent years, and proper medication kept the psychosis in check. It seemed that the voices in his head were gone.

  If he’d ever been psychotic in the first place.

  Over the course of the past forty years, a few psychiatric patients had slipped beneath Furuberget’s radar. Though it was not something he wanted to admit publicly, it was indisputably true. It was almost impossible to identify the nearly perfect psychopaths. They could be your
best friend and better actors than you would find on any stage. But they would never have confessed to six murders just like that. That was only the beginning of the mystery of Anders Rask.

  He thought of the letter that he had let through.

  The sender was anonymous, he remembered that. Though the contents were cryptic, they seemed harmless. Rask had received a number of anonymous letters over the years, and Furuberget had passed all of them on to him.

  I have to read that letter again. He had thought it was from one of Rask’s many admirers when he read it the first time. Could it be from the person who had actually killed these girls? Or one of Rask’s co-conspirators? Rune Flatanger at the Criminal Police had told him that they couldn’t rule out any possibilities at this time, and that no connection had been found between Rask and the person who had tried to kill the girl on Frognerveien.

  He found the date of the letter he was searching for. The “From” box in the electronic subject field was glaringly empty. In the comment field it said, “Undated letter, date from postmark on the envelope.” He studied the date. March 22. A Monday, wasn’t it? Postmarked Oslo Mail Terminal. He didn’t know that much about the post office, but assumed that the letter was placed in one of the mailboxes in the vicinity of Oslo Central Station, right by the mail-sorting terminal. This meant that the sender lived or worked in Oslo. Unless he’d gone into the city and mailed the letter there, with the intention of misleading them.

  The only thing he could be certain of was the date.

  The letter had been postmarked a little more than a week after Rask’s attorney had gone to Dagbladet with the news that his client had retracted his confession. He hadn’t killed Kristiane Thorstensen after all. The following day, the newspaper had featured the request for reopening the case. The following Monday this letter had been sent to Rask. Furuberget figured that the letter writer must have thought about it for a few days before writing and mailing it.

  It could be a coincidence, of course. But Furuberget had a special sense for such things. He was a man of science, but sometimes he could feel when he had made a fateful error. Twice he had released patients who were healthy according to standard psychological metrics, even though he knew deep down that they were dangerous. It had gone wrong both times. A murder and a grotesque rape. Now Anders Rask had taken the first step toward release with the Kristiane case. If he won, the others would be in jeopardy. All the patients knew that the evidence in their own cases was equally inadequate.

  The letter, thought Furuberget again. That damned letter.

  He only had six months left until retirement, and now he found himself in a quandary. He knew that he should let it be, turn a blind eye to this situation and leave it to his successor, but he was no fool; he knew that if he did such a thing, his conscience would ruin his final years here on earth.

  Should he have realized that the man who tried to kill the girl last night was the same one who had written to Rask? It was a wild notion, so wild that only a patient on the maximum-security ward would even have thought of it. Nevertheless, Furuberget found himself unable to ignore it.

  He knew that Rask had a folder that contained all his correspondence.

  There was only one thing to do.

  Tomorrow, when Rask was at the workshop, he would go into his room and find the letter.

  Either Rask had committed all the murders himself, or he had been used by someone who was close to him. But there was a third alternative: that two of them had been involved in the murders—and the other one was still at large.

  He had an idea that he should have had long ago. Was it possible that Anders Rask communicated with the other person by letter, and that person wrote to him anonymously? Why hadn’t he considered that possibility before?

  Because no one had killed anyone in this manner since Rask had been arrested.

  Furuberget searched for Anders Rask in the “Sender” field in the mail archive. Then he printed out a list of all the letters he had sent since 1994.

  9

  The sound of the snowplow blade broke the silence, and its orange light flickered through the curtains. Then everything turned quiet again.

  Already so much snow. The thought was almost unbearable.

  Elisabeth Thorstensen sat up in bed and glanced at the digits on the digital clock radio. She reached for the vial of valium. Her regular doctor had prescribed it after she collapsed at the store. In front of the newspaper rack.

  How many do I have to take?

  There weren’t enough to be able to end it all.

  Take one to sleep? Who cared about sleeping?

  She got an old lover—an anesthesiologist at an Oslo clinic—to prescribe Seconal for her. But it was far from enough, since she was only allowed one red capsule at a time. So once a week, she took her pill and slept for a full twenty-four-hour stretch. That would have to do.

  Her voice, she thought. That was the very worst. That she wasn’t able to summon her voice.

  “Kristiane,” she whispered out into the darkness. Each syllable a song of its own.

  She told herself that if she just lay quietly enough, she would be able to remember her voice. “I’m home!” coming from down the hall. The bag dropped on the floor. The shoes she never took off. The squealing and laughter from her room, full of friends. Her own fingers through the thick curls, the salty hair after a day in the sun at Kragerø.

  Sometimes she fell asleep during the day and heard steps on the stairs. Her steps. The disappointment grew greater every time she discovered that it was only Peter.

  As she got up, her nightgown fell to the floor. For a moment she thought that someone else had taken it off her. “No,” she whispered. “I’m alone.” She stood naked in front of the mirror. The swelling around her wrists and ankles had gone down a bit. Some bruises were left, that was all. He liked it rough, and she’d always given him what he wanted. She was born to do that—to be powerless—but sometimes he had crossed the line. That had all been a long time ago. Last night, he had been worn out, old.

  Those were the kind of men she attracted. Or to be more precise, the kind of men she wanted. That was probably what had attracted them to each other back in the day. Plus and minus. She had wanted to be minus. A damned minus.

  Asgeir no longer touched her, so that wasn’t a problem. Or rather, she was the one who didn’t touch him. She put her hands around her breasts. They were still nice, but it had been expensive—just like the rest of the discreet cosmetic interventions she’d had done. She’d promised herself eternal life on the outside. If Kristiane stood in the door one day—if she ever came back—she wanted to be just like she had been then.

  Kristiane is back, she thought. If I leave this room, she will come back.

  She walked quietly past Asgeir’s room. The low rumbling coming from in there filled her with contempt. The way he still loved filled her with contempt. As if she were made of porcelain. He didn’t want to sleep with her—or more correctly, was no longer able to sleep with her. It was as if he’d given up any effort to be a sexual being. But he would still behave like a caring husband till death do us part, even if he knew perfectly well that she slept with other men. He hadn’t even asked where she’d been last night. Didn’t hear her phone ring during the evening. Or that she’d pulled out of the garage.

  Asgeir was so easy to fool that it was hardly even exciting.

  She dug out a bag of panty liners from the back of the medicine cabinet. The way an alcoholic hides bottles, she thought, smiling at herself in the mirror. She made a slightly bigger opening in the plastic packaging and shook out the two razor blades she’d placed there.

  She carefully pulled the edge of one razor blade across the scars on her wrist. The skin was still thinner there than on the rest of her forearm and always would be. A shiver of phantom pain cut through her, as if she’d opened the artery again.

  She got up fumbling from the floor, almost fainted over the sink. The sight of her pale face in the mirror scare
d her. It slowly turned into Kristiane’s, and she held her hands to her mouth so as not to scream. Then, the very thing that had happened so many times that she should have known better happened.

  Kristiane stood behind her, in a long row, as if she was a Russian nesting doll that had been disassembled. Naked, the way she’d been in the pictures from the autopsy. She’d insisted on seeing them. Screamed when she did. It was the biggest mistake of her life.

  No, not the biggest.

  Snakes grew out of Kristiane’s mouth, and blood streamed out of her eyes. She appeared to scream at Elisabeth, but didn’t make a sound, apart from a faint rumbling. Finally the pale dead face turned into a vipers’ nest. The snakes spit blood at the mirror and grew bigger, eventually striking her on the neck and licking her back with their hissing forked tongues.

  Elisabeth scratched her face so hard that the marks would be visible in the morning.

  “Away, away, away,” she whispered. She’d had these dream visions thousands of times. Why couldn’t she learn to live with them? Kristiane wasn’t dangerous. She had never been dangerous.

  I have to dare to turn around.

  She slowly turned around.

  No one was there.

  The dozen or so ghosts of Kristiane who had been standing behind her were gone. On the floor were bare tiles. There were no bloody footprints like the ones she’d seen a few days ago. No black snakes crawling over her body.

  “It’s only your imagination,” she said to the room.

  Why did that damned newspaper have to print those pictures of her? Why did they have to write about her? It was as if she had been killed all over again in front of everyone, in front of the whole country, a naked little girl, mutilated, scared and alone.

  She tore off a long length of toilet paper, which she then wrapped around the razor blades. Then she left the bathroom and headed downstairs. She stopped halfway. There were no steps behind her. Kristiane wasn’t following her. Don’t follow me tonight, she said to herself. Please, not tonight.