by Gard Sveen
“Yes,” said Sørvaag. “But it’s damned strange.” He leaned forward in his chair, almost like an over-eager schoolboy who was about to tell his teacher a good story, but then forgot what it was.
“That was cryptic,” said Finneland. Bergmann could clearly see the sweat rings on his shirt. The dark areas under his armpits grew every time he moved his arms. Finneland was thin and sinewy, with a boyish appearance, the kind of man who worked out six days a week with a pulse-rate monitor. A man of which there’s a dime a dozen, thought Bergmann. There were more and more of his kind, a type that didn’t exist when he started in this business.
“My first boss here in the building. You must remember him, Hanne,” Sørvaag said, turning to the police chief. “Old Lorentzen, he was head of Homicide back then. I’m fairly certain he was the one who mentioned Edle once, maybe even several times. Or was it Edel? Ellen? This was in the seventies. As far as I recall, her middle name was Maria.”
Finneland looked like he was about to run out of patience. Rune Flatanger had rolled up his shirt sleeves and jotted down some notes on his pad. Bergmann did the same himself. Much could be said about Halgeir Sørvaag, but he knew him well enough to take the man seriously.
“Okay,” said Finneland reluctantly. “It sounds pretty off the wall, Sørvaag, but have the personnel file for this Lorentzen checked. Then we should be able to figure out where he worked, or if he’s still alive.”
“He died ten years ago,” said the police chief. She nodded to Sørvaag to continue.
“Lorentzen, or Lorentz as we called him, told a few of us about a case involving a young girl up north somewhere who was killed in a pretty vile way. They never found the killer, and I recall him saying that he never forgot that case. I’m sure her name was Edle Maria.”
“I think that’s a long shot, Sørvaag. But I’ll give it a try. It must be possible, damn it, to figure out if some Maria or other was killed north of the Arctic Circle. When was it this Edle Maria murder took place? Or was it Ellen?”
“I don’t think it was Ellen. It must have been sometime in the sixties. In northern Norway, I think.”
“Anyone remember any of this? It must have created some uproar.”
“Norway was like two countries back then,” said Flatanger. “Whatever happened north of Trondheim was of little or no interest down here.”
“True enough,” said Sørvaag. “Damn it, they weren’t interested in any of us from up in Sunnmøre back then.”
“So neither of you can remember the case?”
“No,” said Hanne Rodahl.
“No one else?” asked Finneland. “Any bells?”
Flatanger threw up his arms. “Beats me,” he said.
Finneland took a deep breath.
“We can’t just go by our gut feelings.” Finneland sighed dejectedly, as if Sørvaag were a child who never learned. “Find the personnel file for Lorentzen, Sørvaag. Then you can get back to us.”
“Good luck, Halgeir,” said Hanne Rodahl. “Maybe we’re not entirely on the wrong track here then, huh?”
“It may have been that Marie was the middle name, when I think about it,” said Sørvaag. “And not Maria.”
Finneland barely managed to suppress a “Good Lord.” He raised his arm and studied his pulse-rate monitor.
“We don’t have time for this. Why should a fourteen-year-old girl from Eastern Europe scream out a reference to an old murder case from Jokkmokk?”
“Maybe the girl was just Catholic,” said Sørvaag a little uncertainly and laughed at himself. Small beads of sweat had formed on his scalp. Bergmann followed one of them as it trickled down his forehead and landed on his eyebrow. He had just managed to get a handkerchief out of his old cardigan when Finneland gave him a piece of his mind.
Bergmann wrote on his notepad in big block letters: “MARIA. EDLE MARIA?”
13
Arne Furuberget thought that the patients might need therapy after spending time in the therapy room. The harsh light made the peach-colored walls appear sickly, like vomit, he thought. He’d spent an unreasonable amount of money to furnish the room a few years ago, and now even he couldn’t stand it. The only extenuating feature of the room was that it faced toward Lake Mjøsa, which was bathed in sunshine just then, encircled by narrow snow-covered fields. The winter light was as sharp as it could only be in the Nordic countries, and such days made Furuberget think that there was no more beautiful country on earth. Why spend sixty thousand kroner on a Christmas vacation in Malaysia?
He turned his thoughts to the man before him. Anders Rask was looking down at his Crocs. The only thing he wanted to talk about today was the reopening of the Kristiane case. Nothing else seemed to interest him. Furuberget put down his pen and pad on the table between them and exchanged glances with the two male nurses. One of them was the temp, Fredriksen. Furuberget felt somewhat embarrassed about his encounter with him. He had lost control for a moment where that cursed letter was concerned.
Furuberget went up to the window and thought that Rask could grab the pen that was on the table, stick it in the nurses’ necks, and then throw himself against the grate in front of the window.
“Why won’t you move me to an open ward?” said Rask behind him.
Furuberget didn’t reply. It was the first time Rask had asked him about it. Something’s cooking, he thought. Something had happened to Rask recently.
“I think you’re going to regret this,” said Rask.
“Why?”
“I just want to be treated like a human being.”
“You are being treated like a human being. Maria,” said Furuberget. “What comes to mind when I say that name?”
He turned toward Rask.
“Jesus.”
“Nothing else?” Furuberget smiled carefully.
Rask just stared ahead indifferently. “Why did you ransack my room, by the way?” he asked.
Furuberget tried to breathe calmly. How could he know?
“I didn’t.”
“Crowley was on the wrong side of the reference book. You made a mistake.”
Furuberget decided not to answer.
“Did you make a drawing of the books’ placement on the shelf?” Though Rask smiled, his eyes were dull and lifeless.
Furuberget hoped that he was able to conceal that he shuddered.
“You should have taken a picture of the bookshelf with your phone.” Rask’s smile widened, like a child’s. “First you put The Book of the Law back wrong, and now you’re asking me about Maria. Magdalena or the Virgin?”
He still has it, thought Furuberget. The letter. But he couldn’t pursue it. He might already have ruined everything.
“What about Edle Maria?”
Rask’s expression remained neutral. He appeared completely uninterested in the conversation.
“What would you say if I told you that I don’t think you’ve killed anyone in your whole life?”
“That you’re going to be slaughtered.” Rask gave out a quiet, girlish laugh.
Furuberget closed his eyes. He had to concentrate so as not to sigh out loud. He felt a certain relief that Rask had finally revealed that he still had violent fantasies. On the other hand, it was the first time they were directed at him.
“It’s been several years since you behaved like this, Anders. I can’t recommend a transfer when you say such things. Even if you have all your cases reopened and are acquitted. Do you understand that? Why do you say such things?”
“Because you want to keep me in here until I die. For that reason you have to die first.”
“Shall we finish up, Anders?”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“We’re done.”
Rask did not answer. He just sat there with a sad smile, as though content at having threatened Furuberget, but disappointed because he knew that now it would be more difficult for him to move to an open ward in the foreseeable future.
Furuberget turned over responsibility for Rask to the two nurses.
In the security passage he remained standing so long that the door had to be unlocked twice. He thought about the conversations he’d had with Rune Flatanger down at Kripo.
For two weeks he’d barely slept a wink.
The murdered girl had screamed “Maria.” Flatanger had sent him the audio file. The girl had also uttered another word before “Maria.” One of the policemen thought the girl had said Edle or Edel. Maybe Ellen. He claimed to recall the name from an earlier case. But then he’d more or less dropped the matter, thought he’d remembered wrong.
But Furuberget knew he’d heard the name before. He just couldn’t remember where. And it wasn’t Edel or Ellen.
It was Edle. Edle Maria. One didn’t forget such a special name.
Flatanger had asked him to bring up the name in his therapy session with Rask. Furuberget hadn’t said a word about it ringing a bell somewhere in the back of his mind. It was just his luck. Just when he’d managed to put the business about the letter behind him, this name turned up.
He looked at the clock on the wall. The girl would be buried down in Oslo in an hour.
Back in his office he took out his calendar and drew an X over today’s date. Five months until retirement.
He hoped that he wouldn’t remember where he’d heard the name Edle Maria before then. That was the key, and he didn’t know if he wanted to find it.
14
It was nearly impossible to smoke a cigarette outside. Bergmann turned up the collar on his jacket, as if that would help against the wind that threatened to cut his head off. But then again, maybe the Alfaset cemetery wasn’t the place for a smoke anyway. He got back in the car and rolled down the window. His gaze was fixed on the white chapel. He tossed the cigarette aside after taking a few drags. The sight of the seemingly endless cemetery repulsed him. This is the last stop, he thought, looking out over the industrial-looking gray landscape. One day I’ll be lying here myself.
But not yet.
Two or three cars were in the big parking lot, but he hardly noticed them. When he walked into the chapel, he saw only Frank Krokhol and a photographer from Dagbladet, both of whom had taken a seat in the front row, and the minister and the funeral director.
The sight was more depressing than he’d been prepared for. He knew that the girl in the casket was a fourteen-year-old who had run away from an orphanage outside Vilnius, and that her name was Daina. The only relative Kripo had managed to track down was an alcoholic aunt who had figured out that the cheapest alternative was to let the Norwegian government lower her niece into the frozen earth in Oslo.
The only consolation was the colorful painting on the back wall, painted by Modernist artist Jakob Weidemann. He remembered that his mother thought his work was nothing more than graffiti. The last time he was here was when she was buried. Though he told himself that was why he was so depressed, he knew that was a lie.
The minister nodded at him and Krokhol. Bergmann took off his jacket and set it between himself and the reporter, as if he wanted to establish a certain distance from him. He wasn’t there out of the goodness of his heart, which Bergmann imagined he himself was. The homicide investigation had more or less dried up, to the point that he was ready to give up. No one had any leads on the man on Cort Adelers Gate; Milovic was keeping his mouth shut about the girl, his attorneys having stopped any attempt to pin him to her; and Finneland had checkmated himself after the amnesty agreement when Milovic delivered the film from inside the club. Finally, the personnel folder for the former head of Homicide, Lorentzen, had disappeared. Sørvaag’s hopeless Maria track was just that—hopeless.
When the minister started preaching, Bergmann thought that he might just as well leave at once. Make sure to get the poor child in the ground, he thought. It was a relief when the bells rang.
Frank Krokhol stood up beside him and tried to look sympathetically at the minister. Bergmann stood up and turned to leave the chapel.
A woman dressed in black sat in the last row. Her hat concealed her face, making her look out of place, as though from another era, or a movie he’d seen once.
She got up slowly and opened the door.
Bergmann put on his jacket and followed her. He turned around and made sure that Krokhol wasn’t following him. Krokhol was still standing with his hands folded before him, trying to appear as dignified as possible, so that the minister would give him some good quotes about the lonely funeral afterward.
The woman was already well ahead of him, heading up the hill toward the parking lot.
“Elisabeth Thorstensen,” Bergmann said to himself. He stopped and let her go.
It couldn’t be anyone else. For a second he had caught her gaze.
For a few seconds he was quite certain.
I’ve seen you before.
Before Skøyenbrynet.
He called Dispatch and got her cell-phone number. It rang four times before going to voice mail. He left a message explaining who he was, and that he would like to speak with her.
“It’s all my fault.”
Why had she said that?
PART TWO
DECEMBER 2004
15
Bergmann moved at a sleepwalker’s pace and had done so for almost two weeks, ever since the Lithuanian girl was buried. They’d rarely had so little to go on. In addition, there was no worse time to be killed than in the last few months of the year. Overtime budgets had long since been used up, and sick leave was pouring in. Besides, there was no escaping the fact that an anonymous young prostitute from Lithuania was soon forgotten in smug, nouveau riche Norway. It was as if there was a tacit understanding that Daina wasn’t one of them. And no one outside headquarters knew yet that she was most likely the latest in a long series of murdered girls.
The vaginal tests taken from Daina at Oslo University Hospital and the microscopic skin fragments removed from under her nails showed a DNA profile that could nicely match the profile that was found on Kristiane Thorstensen in 1988, and the next victim—another prostitute—in February 1989. The problem was that the old profiling system was so rudimentary that the profile fit 10 percent of all men. Nonetheless, when compared with the injuries Daina had sustained, it was probable that they were facing one and the same perpetrator. For that reason, it was also becoming more and more likely that Anders Rask was innocent.
But there was a lid on this information. Reuter didn’t want to give away anything that might be of interest to the perpetrator, and Hanne Rodahl didn’t want to frighten the inhabitants of Oslo right before Christmas, much less reveal the agency’s hopelessly meager headway in the investigation. She hoped to be promoted to police commissioner sometime in the new year, so it was better to say as little as possible about what she called internally “an extremely unpleasant mystery.” Though the press releases stated that “out of consideration for the investigation the police cannot provide any additional information,” in reality such nonsense meant “we’re fumbling blindly.” Sadly, Daina’s only hope for justice was that she had probably been killed by the same man who had killed six other girls starting in 1978. That was the only reason she was even still an agenda item for Bergmann, Sørvaag, and the rest of headquarters.
She was probably killed by the man who was supposed to be Anders Rask. But who couldn’t be Rask. The man who had killed Kristiane Thorstensen.
Bergmann knew that if he found out who killed Daina, then he would find out who’d killed Kristiane and the others. But Rask was locked up at the Ringvoll psychiatric ward. And someone had committed an almost identical murder only a few weeks before. So that couldn’t have anything to do with Rask.
Or could it?
As he started down the steps to the subway, Bergmann considered that Rask might be in the process of lulling the whole country into an illusion of his own innocence. Three or four Somali men jumped aside—the mere sight of him enough to make them afraid of being arrested—but he couldn’t care less that they were openly bargaining over a gram of khat. As he
continued down into the narrow tunnel, the cold from the street was gradually replaced by an intoxicating warmth from the row of underground shops. The heat had a deadening effect on him, and he felt how little he’d slept the past few weeks. Not even the ice-cold gust of wind down on the platform caused him to wake up properly. His peripheral vision seemed to have dissolved, and shadows glided before him, appearing suddenly from the side, before they disappeared again. Every sound was amplified and hard, almost metallic between the walls of his cranium. With every crackle in the loudspeakers, a nasal voice that reported further delays, he started, nearly reaching for an invisible pistol holster under his bubble jacket.
The platform was filled with people from every corner of the globe, dressed in multiple layers to guard against the steadily increasing cold. Resignation was written on their faces, as if they thought they wouldn’t survive yet another winter. Bergmann had never thought of Oslo as the sort of city that stroked your cheek and whispered seductive words in your ear, but the past few weeks had been so fiercely cold that the city resembled a bombed-out war zone, in which people ran from building to building and sought shelter from underground subway stations like this.
He’d been to his first hour at the Alternatives to Violence offices in Lilletorget and felt completely empty, like the sort of gray concrete conduit that snaked through the satellite city. He didn’t know whether he liked the therapist, but he’d been more open with him than with Viggo Osvold. Osvold was the sensitive one; he moved like a cat around warm porridge, cushioning his words in cotton. ATV was nothing like that. But he didn’t want to stop going to Osvold. Although ATV could surely teach him to behave like an almost normal man, Osvold could reach deeper down. Bergmann had both feet stuck in a childhood that was nothing but a black hole. He had a vague memory of having lain somewhere a long time, perhaps for hours, alone, while he screamed. That was his first memory, and he couldn’t have been very old. It came to him more and more often these days. At last he’d stopped screaming. Then he’d heard other voices and someone crying. Was it his mother? He didn’t know, how could he know?