Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  She picked up that day’s Dagbladet in the office and went into the kitchen. There were still embers in the fireplace. Maybe Rose had smoked under the hood. Or Kristiane.

  Stop, you sick creature. Stop.

  She paged through the newspaper. Asgeir had cut out the pictures of Kristiane. She ran her fingers across the square holes. Then she unwrapped the toilet paper and picked up one of the razor blades. She cut across the face of the byline picture of the reporter, Frank Krokhol, the one who always had to write about Kristiane. Then she cut a slit across his throat.

  She walked upstairs as if sleepwalking. She stood in the darkness outside Peter’s room for a long time. Somewhere in the distance she heard the snowplow rumbling along. Like thunder. For a moment she was certain that she would never hear thunder again. That this would be her last winter.

  She pushed open the door to his room. The big room was far more than he needed, the sleeping, spoiled boy.

  With careful steps she moved across the floor. He hadn’t pulled the curtains, and his face was visible in the soft glow from the streetlight. For several minutes she sat on the edge of his bed and listened to his heavy breathing, her fingers gripping the edge of the razor blades, one in each hand.

  At last reason won out.

  She kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Even though he was twelve and had the body of a fifteen-year-old, Peter still slept the innocent sleep of a child. She pulled the coverlet over his shoulders and gently stroked his hair.

  Down in the office she turned on her computer. The bluish light was reflected in the windowpane, and she quickly pulled the curtains closed.

  The murder attempt on Frognerveien was still the top story on Dagbladet’s website. She pressed her finger against the screen, right on the eyes of Frank Krokhol, an old byline picture in which he looked younger than he did today.

  Attempted murder of prostitute last night. Her condition is serious, life-threatening injuries. Taken to a hospital in the Østland region. The police did not want to release further information at this time. They would like to make contact with a man who was seen on Cort Adelers Gate at about two o’clock Thursday morning.

  Elisabeth enlarged the screen image, but it only made the picture of the man with the cap and dark overcoat look fuzzier.

  It didn’t matter. She knew it was him. It couldn’t be anyone else.

  She’d gone to the Radisson hotel, just like she had in the old days. But he hadn’t arrived until three o’clock in the morning. Or was it four? She was unable to remember.

  No, she thought. No. Not just him. It must be something worse. Something far worse. He’d looked at her back then. She knew everything about such looks. He’d watched Kristiane since she was twelve or thirteen. With the same desire that he’d looked at Elisabeth.

  Had she been blind to certain things? The way her own mother had been? Had they both been after her?

  But worse, she thought.

  No, he wasn’t that old back then.

  Had she carried something so dreadful inside her?

  If they hadn’t sold the house, she could have gone up to the room and checked. It was her hair. She couldn’t mistake Kristiane’s hair. It really was.

  That Saturday, she thought. November 1988.

  When did she leave? When did she come back?

  She closed the screen on Dagbladet’s website and searched for the police hotline in the Yellow Pages. With weightless steps she walked down the hall to the landline phone. She held the scrap of paper in her hand carefully, as if it were a newborn infant, as if it were Kristiane herself in 1973.

  She entered the first few digits. Then she hung up.

  Why should I speak up?

  It wouldn’t bring her back to life.

  It wouldn’t give her any peace either, because she had never said anything back then.

  What could she say? They would just send her back. For satanic irony.

  Rask? It had never been Rask.

  Rask. What a laughable idea.

  She groped her way farther down the hallway, as if she were in an unfamiliar house in pitch darkness. The door to the guest bathroom opened, and she tumbled across the threshold.

  She started to smile, studied her own face in the mirror. She got uglier and uglier.

  “I was always more beautiful than you,” she said to her reflection.

  The next thing she remembered, she was standing in the entry, with her coat on. Black eyes. Kristiane’s voice filled her head—at least what she thought was her voice, a thin girl voice, like a preschool girl. She went slowly upstairs. Into her bedroom. Screamed. Had she screamed?

  Kristiane had no room here. It wasn’t her house.

  She would soon learn that they no longer lived in Skøyenbrynet. She had a new husband, a new life; she had for a long time now.

  She had to pee, but didn’t dare go into a room with a mirror. She knew that Kristiane would be standing behind her again.

  She screamed loudly before she fell to the floor.

  She was still lying on the floor when Rose came in. Rose got down on her knees beside her.

  “Elisabeth,” she said quietly. “It’s all right, Elisabeth.”

  “Not a word,” said Elisabeth apathetically. “You mustn’t say anything to Asgeir. Promise me that. He’ll send me back. I can’t take it, okay?”

  Rose stroked her forehead. She promised, just as she promised every time.

  “Don’t quit. You must never quit.”

  Rose undressed her in the bedroom, until Elisabeth was standing completely naked before her. Rose held up one of her arms and studied the bruises.

  “Who is doing this to you?” She stroked Elisabeth’s forearm.

  Elisabeth shook her head.

  “Don’t ask me about it. Ever.”

  “You should lie down now,” Rose said, leading Elisabeth over to the bed. She left the bedroom door ajar just as much as Elisabeth wanted.

  Elisabeth kept herself awake until she heard Asgeir’s alarm clock ring at six thirty. Then she started stroking herself to the thought of him. She hadn’t even showered since Saturday. And no one would ever get to see the bruises.

  I do everything for him, don’t I?

  10

  A voice caused him to wake up. Bergmann stifled his own scream. He gasped for breath and felt goose bumps rise on his skin. He shivered as he recalled the dream. Not the one he usually had—the one with the doll-faced girl in the forest, in which he never reached her in time—but something worse. Much worse. A dream in black and white. He was lying in a casket. At the last second he threw his arms up and kept the lid from being closed over him.

  He looked around the room, his breathing still so heavy that he barely managed to get air down into his lungs. The room was much too large for him to feel secure. All was silent. The only thing he could see were the snowflakes outside the window.

  He turned on the lamp on the side table. The clock on the wall showed it was two in the morning.

  Was he in the ICU? No. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t remember exactly, even if it had only been an hour or two since he was brought here. He didn’t even remember what day it was. He could hardly recall why he was here at all. He lay there for a while, turning from side to side. He should have turned off the lamp, but it made him feel safer to keep it on. It was the first time he’d ever dreamed that he was going to die—and buried alive to boot.

  He heard a sound in the corridor, the first noise since he’d woken up. A door opening, followed by electric door closers equalizing. Then cautious steps, wasn’t that it? The steps stopped right outside his door. For a moment he was certain that the door was pushed open an inch or two; he could see a little strip of light appear on the floor.

  He tried to hold his breath as he sat up in bed, preparing to throw himself down on the floor. The water glass, he thought. I’ll break it and shove it into his throat.

  He sat that way for perhaps as long as a minute, breathing qui
etly in and out of his nose.

  At last the door closed.

  He went over to the door as quietly as he could. He held up the glass and opened the door.

  Glanced first to the left, then to the right.

  Nothing.

  Only a seemingly endless corridor with bottle-green flooring and an equally long row of wash lights in the ceiling, every other one turned on. He turned his focus back to his breathing. With dream-like steps he went back into the room and carefully closed the door. He wasn’t sure whether any of it had really happened or if it was simply his imagination.

  For a while he remained standing by the window. It was snowing more heavily now. A few cars were driving west, and he followed them with his gaze. He thought about Hege, who lived somewhere around here, in Blindern. He was no better than the man who at this moment was hunting for the girl in the ICU. He wasn’t. Then he thought about Hadja. She was the only person for whom he’d felt anything since Hege left. They’d had a flicker of a relationship last summer before he’d withdrawn without giving her a reasonable explanation. He excused himself somewhere deep down. There was so much she didn’t know, so much he never wanted—or could never bring himself—to tell her.

  “Someone else has to save you,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

  He fell asleep again.

  The next thing he knew he was being shaken by the shoulder. A dark-skinned nurse was standing over him.

  He thought he was still dreaming.

  Once again he looked right into his own face in the dream; he was the one who was trying to beat the little doll-faced girl to death. The image of the bloody body crawling away from him mixed with the sight of the nurse. For a few seconds he couldn’t grasp what was dream and what was reality.

  The young woman before him said a few words. She spoke in the dialect of the south coast; it was as if summer came out of her mouth. He was going to ask where he was, when he finally managed to register what she was telling him.

  “She’s awake.”

  He stuffed his shirt in his pants as he followed her down the hall. When she held her key card up to the door at the end of the corridor, it seemed to take the lock ages to open. He tore open the door as soon as the lock emitted a clicking sound, and they ran down the stairs to the floor below. The nurse was several steps ahead of him when they reached the doors to the ICU. He was gasping for breath as he hurried after her down the corridor, half-blinded by the strong light of the ward. A crowd of people stood outside the nurses’ office, and he recognized the doctor from earlier in the evening. She met his gaze. Her eyes were narrow and wreathed by dark circles; she looked as though she’d aged in just a few hours. She was speaking with a male colleague and her expression was even more serious than before.

  Bergmann tried to hear what they were saying, but couldn’t quite catch their rapid exchange.

  “Sorry to interrupt you.”

  “You can go in,” said the male doctor, older than himself, as he studied Bergmann from head to toe.

  “Is she talking?”

  “Incoherently. I don’t understand a thing. She’s speaking another language. Sounds Slavic, but I don’t think it’s Polish.”

  “Quick,” said Bergmann. He pushed a nurse aside, headed into the nurses’ office, and rushed to put on the coat and hairnet. The two doctors then led him into the girl’s room. The light in there was stronger than it had been the night before, making it harder to read the measurement devices on the other side of the bed. The girl was slowly writhing from side to side. A nurse he hadn’t seen before was bent over her, holding her hand and stroking her forehead.

  “There now,” said the nurse. “There now.”

  For the first time Bergmann thought the woman doctor looked bewildered. The girl started whispering, then kept interrupting herself with small moans of pain. She seemed to be trying to stay calm, unless she was just so doped up that she was in no condition to speak.

  He thought he saw blood under the bandages on her torso, but he knew he could be mistaken. She’d pulled down her blanket. But yes. Upon closer inspection, it looked like her wounds had started bleeding again. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Deep down he knew that no surgeon could stop her internal bleeding.

  The girl started speaking more loudly, but still incomprehensibly. He went over to the bed and stood alongside the nurse. The girl’s eyes were still closed. She was whispering quietly now, so quietly that it was almost impossible to hear her. He pushed the nurse to the side and leaned down toward the girl.

  She mumbled something even more quietly. He could feel her breath against his cheek. She already smelled of death and decay.

  Just as he was about to straighten up a little, the hairs on his body stood up.

  The girl opened her eyes and looked right at him. They were gray and already lifeless.

  “Maria,” she said quietly.

  He shook his head.

  She reached her arm out toward him, almost tearing out the cannula, but she didn’t seem to notice. She took his hand and squeezed it. Her hand was so little that it disappeared in his. She mumbled another word before quietly repeating the name Maria. Then, again, this word he didn’t understand. Edel?

  No.

  Without warning she screamed, “Maria!”

  Bergmann was so shocked he let go of her hand and took a step back.

  She sat up in bed and screamed louder than Bergmann thought a person could. The room filled with white and green coats. He staggered backward until he touched the wall.

  Suddenly the screams stopped. The fragile body gave off a few twitches. After those thirty seconds of chaos, silence fell.

  “Defibrillator,” said the doctor. Though her voice was calm, Bergmann understood that she had no control over the situation. She looked almost helpless for a moment, then she recovered her composure. The two doctors exchanged brief commands. Bergmann glanced over at the medical equipment. Everything appeared to have flattened out. The girl’s hospital gown was torn, and her bandaged body almost jumped in the bed.

  He could do nothing but watch. Watch as they were losing her.

  “We’re losing her,” the woman doctor said, confirming his worst fears before the doors to the operating room closed.

  Bergmann remained standing in the corridor outside the nurses’ office. He stood helplessly with his fist clenched around a scrap of paper he barely remembered having written on. He leaned against the door frame, pulled the mask off his mouth, and opened his hand. On the crumpled piece of paper it simply said “Maria.”

  “We’re losing her,” he said to himself.

  He left the ICU, still wearing the white coat, hairnet, and shoe protectors, and stumbled up the steps to the floor above. He walked down several corridors but couldn’t find his way back to his room. It was four thirty in the morning, and there was no one in sight. He eventually found a nurse and tried to explain that his police ID was in this room he was unable to find. She stared at the piece of paper in his hand. He was gripping it tightly, as though afraid of losing it.

  His bubble jacket was still there, hanging untouched over the chair.

  When the nurse left, he studied the door to the room. The door closer was fairly strong, with good resistance until about halfway, but it wouldn’t have required much strength to open it a crack. He went out in the corridor and closed the door. Then he pushed it open, the way it had been opened earlier that night. He had to push to gain a clearance of a couple of inches. A gust of wind or low pressure could never have opened the door. Besides, nothing here could cause a draft. He pushed the door wide open.

  Who was here last night?

  Or had he been dreaming?

  He decided to ask the nurse down at reception if anyone had entered the hospital earlier that night; there may even be a visitor list. She was talking on the phone while another nurse and an orderly stood by the reception desk.

  He waited a minute or two, but she paid no attention to him. He knew perfectly well they didn�
��t keep a visitor list. And even if they did, the man he was looking for wouldn’t have signed in under his own name. But he could be found on the footage from the surveillance cameras in the reception area.

  He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. He could use a little fresh air. “Maria! Maria!” was still ringing in his ears.

  He decided to leave, to walk until he found a taxi, even if it took a while to track one down.

  Just as the doors opened and he was about to go out into the massive snowstorm, he sensed that he ought to turn around.

  The nurse was still on the phone, but she met his gaze, as if she had been waiting for him to turn around.

  Then she lowered her eyes and continued her phone conversation.

  11

  There was light driving snow over Lake Mjøsa. The landscape seemed shapeless, as if it were an Impressionist painting whose details had been blurred.

  Arne Furuberget finished off the croissant he’d warmed up in the microwave down in the hospital kitchen. The closest he got to the aroma of a big city was the vacuum-packed croissants at the supermarket Rema 1000. He could have worked anywhere in the world, but had ended up at this remote location in Toten.

  At exactly five minutes to ten he broke up the management meeting and sent the rest of the group out the door. Rask would be taken from his room to the workshop at exactly ten o’clock, where he would work for two hours until lunch. That gave Furuberget three hours to search his room. It could go more quickly if he had help, but he couldn’t take that chance. Searching for a letter he had already released was illegal.

  He walked quickly up the stairs to the third floor. Once there he slowed down. His pulse was racing, but his breathing was regular. After a knee injury last year, he couldn’t run as much as he used to, but he got out enough to keep himself in better shape than most people on the brink of seventy.

  Outside the security passage to the ward, he went into the nurses’ office and assured himself that Rask had been taken to the workshop. Then he asked the shift leader to give the order to turn off the camera inside Rask’s room.

  “No questions” was all he said.