by Gard Sveen
A black hole, he thought. And he could get no damned further without help. He understood that much at least.
Line 4 to Bergkrystallen finally appeared, shooting down the track like a dragon out of the black hole.
He stared at a picture of a woman in one of the ads on display between the platforms. She had long, wet hair and was dressed in a bikini; behind her was a Turkish sea, a palm tree, hot sand under her feet. A suntanned man had his arms around her. It was as far away from a late Monday afternoon in December at sixty degrees north latitude as you could get. As he looked at it, the woman’s face blurred between the windows of the subway and morphed into Kristiane Thorstensen’s. The doors opened, and Bergmann forced his way into the car. He found a place to stand closest by the doors and got a final glimpse of the smiling female model in the ad. “The days you remember,” it said at the bottom. Kristiane had gotten no more days, no chance to head south in the middle of winter with the man in her life. How old would she have been today? He counted back. Thirty-two. No, thirty-one. And would she have looked like that? Yes, he said to himself. Yes, that could easily have been her in the ad.
Kristiane Thorstensen had been dead for sixteen years, and now she was everywhere. He saw her face wherever he looked. Even when he didn’t want to look, his gaze was drawn toward a man who sat with his back to him, in the seat next to the Plexiglas wall, struggling with one of the advertising supplements in Aftenposten. As the man browsed the newspaper, Bergmann knew what was coming—he’d read the paper himself earlier that day.
The commission had made the decision right before the weekend: they had ruled in favor of Anders Rask and allowed the Kristiane case to be reopened. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of it, and the television newscasts had gone overboard with speculation. There was hardly anything else on the radio.
“Who Killed Kristiane?” was Aftenposten’s headline. The obligatory ninth-grade class photo of her, dating back to the early fall of 1988, filled half the page. Bergmann felt a little surge in his belly and cursed himself for it. Every time he saw her face, he once again became the boy he’d once been, unhappily and unattainably in love with girls like her. She had a round face, borderline chubby, with curly hair. He thought that the boys had probably named her the “prettiest at school”—though not the “nicest”—and wondered whether she had had that undefinable something that blew the boys away and gave her more girlfriends than she really needed.
Yes, thought Bergmann, this was precisely how he imagined Kristiane Thorstensen. Simply by seeing her smile and her eyes—which seemed to glisten as they gazed toward the photographer—the natural curls and the little cleft in her chin, Bergmann knew that Kristiane was the kind of girl no one ever forgot. He wondered how many boys had heard her say, I like you too, but as a friend, promise me you won’t be sad, okay?
He’d never had anything to do with that murder investigation, having just graduated from the Police Academy at that time, but God only knew how many hours he’d spent thinking about her in the years that followed.
He should have felt guilty because it was actually Kristiane’s killer he wanted to find, not the poor Lithuanian girl’s. At times it seemed as if he’d altogether forgotten the girl who was buried in a country her aunt couldn’t afford to travel to, and who couldn’t afford to bury her in her homeland either.
But he remembered only Kristiane. Not the poor faceless ones, but the privileged girl who had lived only a stone’s throw from where he himself had grown up.
“Kristiane,” he muttered, as if he were an old recluse talking to himself. He’d tried to forget her, repress her, banish her from his mind for the past sixteen years. He’d made a promise to her there in the woods. A promise to a young girl who would never be more than fifteen years old that he would always be good.
He glanced over at the newspaper that the man in the seat beside him was reading. Her big eyes looked right at him. It was as if she were saying to him, How could you?
16
The living room floor was overflowing with newspapers. Every one of them was opened to the Anders Rask cases. One of them had a facsimile of an old two-page spread that read “The Monster” in fat bold type over an almost ten-year-old picture of Rask. The man who was convicted of Kristiane Thorstensen’s murder had gotten the case reopened, and now the other five murders he’d been convicted of were in line. Rask’s defense counsel, a young attorney from Gjøvik, had a three-page interview in VG, under the headline “Finds No Convicting Evidence.” The journalists had plenty to say, but Bergmann couldn’t blame them. The news was a gift to them. He’d read the commission’s justification for reopening the case, and it was painful reading, almost a character assassination of the police, and Kripo in particular. It seemed as if an earthquake was gathering force under the trifecta of press, prosecutor, and court. Had they all been wrong? Was Anders Rask not the fiend they’d all agreed that he was, a beast that deserved to die a slow and painful death? Was he merely an assailant—bad enough, but no murderer?
Bergmann put a VHS cassette into the old player under the TV. The cassette was labeled “Rask September 1994 NRK.” He hadn’t watched the documentary about Rask for a few years—couldn’t bear the sight of him—but he couldn’t put it off any longer. He cleared the coffee table of the remnants of dinner, the butcher Anders Rask and food not exactly compatible.
Bergmann lit a cigarette and held it up to the TV screen, so that the ember hit young Rask right below his right eye. A clip from a 17th of May celebration in the early 1960s appeared on the screen. The quality of the color film and the fact that they could afford a movie camera at that time suggested that Rask came from a well-to-do family. But according to the filmmaker, Rask had grown up the child of divorced parents in Slemdal. His mother rented a little basement apartment, they were short of money, and Rask had presumably been seriously bullied at school at first but eventually got along fine. He did well at school and graduated with an education degree from the Eik campus in Tønsberg of Vestfold University College in 1979. Tønsberg was also where he found his first victim. He was completing his practice hours at Presterød School when he killed Anne-Lee Fransen, a spindly thirteen-year-old girl who’d been adopted from South Korea.
Bergmann fast-forwarded past the interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists. He knew their explanations all too well. Anders Rask was a classic example of an alienated, sensitive child, with an Oedipal and subsequently pathological love-hate relationship with his mother, who had struggled with rather extensive mental problems and been hospitalized several times herself. It was also made clear that Rask’s father had abused the two daughters he had with his new wife, and there was also speculation about whether he’d abused Rask when he was a child as well, a question to which Rask had always responded ambiguously. Rask maintained that he had repressed most of his childhood and adolescence, but that glimpses of a nightmarish past had come back to him when he started studying at the teachers college. One thing that he hadn’t repressed were several assaults on children he’d taught, as well as on smaller children when he himself was a boy. The Oslo police had first taken Rask into presentence custody for sexually assaulting a girl at Bryn School in the winter of 1992. It was during these interrogations that Rask quite surprisingly admitted that he’d murdered Kristiane Thorstensen, who had been his pupil at Vetlandsåsen Middle School back in 1986. He’d quickly gone on to confess to the murders of five other girls. During the police questioning he changed his explanation several times, before he finally maintained firmly that he heard voices in his head that ordered him to kill these girls, an explanation he stuck to during the trial.
Bergmann fast-forwarded the cassette up to the reconstruction of the first murder in Tønsberg. The filmmaker had no footage covering the murder of Kristiane, which was a relief. Bergmann never wanted to go back to those woods south of the city, not even on film.
He froze the tape on the image of Anders Rask, who stood bent over some underbrush by a forest roa
d in the heart of Vestfold. It was here that he raped and killed Anne-Lee Fransen the last weekend of August 1978, after she’d visited him at home in the basement apartment he rented from a half-senile elderly woman in Tønsberg. The method of killing in the subsequent cases followed the same pattern. Traces of adhesive were found around the mouth, nose, wrists, and ankles of all the victims, which presumably came from the roll of duct tape that was found at Rask’s place in 1992. He had evidently stuck to the same type of duct tape since 1978. Some of Kristiane’s belongings had also been found at Rask’s place—books, ballpoint pens, and school photos of her—so there was circumstantial evidence that he was the right man. When some of Anne-Lee Fransen’s hair and possessions were found in his apartment at Haugerud in Oslo, the case was nearly closed. The fact that they had never found any of the other girls’ possessions was largely ignored. Two months after the confession the prosecutor submitted what the press contradictorily called “convicting circumstantial evidence,” and everyone agreed that Anders Rask was the worst monster the country had produced for as long as anyone could remember, perhaps ever. None of the autopsies could establish whether the girls were dead before he attacked them with the knife and blunt instruments, because they’d been lying outside too long. Four of them had likely died from loss of blood during the assault.
The prosecutor’s so-called convicting circumstantial evidence was based on laboratory tests from Great Britain. Newly developed DNA technology by Imperial Chemicals had already unambiguously revealed in January 1989 that the sperm found in and on Kristiane Thorstensen confirmed that the perpetrator had blood type A and an enzyme profile that excluded 90 percent of all men. The samples from the prostitute who was killed after Kristiane, during New Year’s in 1989, showed the same result. When Rask gave his blood samples, he was determined to be among the 10 percent of men with the same enzyme profile, and he also had blood type A. That was enough for the municipal court to decide without a doubt that Rask did not suffer from confession syndrome—despite the fact that he fumbled when asked to describe the injuries he had inflicted on the girls and instead spoke of his compulsion to assault and kill girls and young women.
Bergmann played the film image by image. Anders Rask finally broke into an incomprehensible smile, as if he found something at the scene amusing. He pressed “Play” again, and the film resumed at normal speed. The camera zoomed in on Rask’s feminine facial features. There was no denying that Rask had an attractive appearance that was misleading, if you didn’t know better.
The voice-over read from Rask’s explanation in court. He had agreed to meet Anne-Lee Fransen at his home, in the basement apartment. He then knocked her unconscious in the bathtub, dumped her body into a garbage bag, and carried her out to the car after dark. The assault and the murder took place out in the forest.
Bergmann switched off the TV. He couldn’t stop himself from fantasizing about what pain he himself would have inflicted on Rask if he’d had the chance. He wanted to kick him to death, grind his mouth to pulp with iron-toed military boots. No. It would be better to let him loose in the courtyard at the correctional facility in Ila, so that they could tear him apart like hyenas. Or crush his body with a baseball bat or a heavy wrench—first his legs, then his arms, then his torso, crotch, and face. Finally the head.
He closed his eyes. If you let yourself think along those lines, you’re finished. Rask had gotten the Kristiane conviction reopened, and Bergmann knew that Rask would likely be released. The threshold for getting a case through the commission was sky high, so high that it was overwhelmingly probable that you were convicted on wrong or shaky grounds. And if he was acquitted of the Kristiane murder, he would probably also be acquitted of the murder of Anne-Lee Fransen and the four other girls. Bergmann couldn’t waste time on crazy revenge fantasies.
Besides, Rask would get to play a new trump card when the police released the news that Daina, the Lithuanian girl, was killed in almost exactly the same way as Kristiane. The question no one really wanted to ask was whether Rask had established contact with someone on the outside. Was he was actually fooling them all? Perhaps there had been two people involved in the murders from the outset. Or perhaps he was simply innocent.
Bergmann told himself that it was a waste of time to watch the documentary again. He was spinning his wheels. The documentary was based on secondary sources, and Rask himself had never given any interviews, except to Bergmann’s contact at Dagbladet, Frank Krokhol. He picked up his phone and scrolled down to Krokhol’s number. He sat there, staring at the digits. It was too late to call, and besides, he ought to wait until after tomorrow’s meeting.
In the bedroom he left the lamp on the nightstand on. He turned over toward the side of the bed that had been Hege’s, and prayed that he wouldn’t have the dream tonight. The dream he’d had countless times since Anders Rask applied to reopen the Kristiane case almost nine months ago, the dream in which he was walking through the dark rain-soaked forest, as if a hand was pushing him from behind, toward a dark figure up ahead who was repeatedly striking at a shapeless figure on the ground. In the dream, he eventually realized the figure was Kristiane Thorstensen, who was still alive. Bergmann ran the final steps and reached out to the person, who turned around and waved the knife at him. He fell backward and discovered that he was the murderer, older than he had been when Kristiane was killed, but just as fully and unmistakably himself.
After trying unsuccessfully for an hour to fall asleep, he got up.
He stood by the living room window and looked out over the apartment buildings on the other side of the square. The white letters of “Blåfjellet Housing Cooperative” were barely visible on the gable wall across the way. He pulled his robe tighter around himself and lit a cigarette. The thick driving snow appeared yellow under the streetlights. The sight made him miss summer, miss Hadja. How long had it been since he’d last seen her? Too long for him to remember. He closed his eyes and tried to picture her, tried to remember her smell, but it was pointless. All he saw in his mind’s eye were the last steps he’d taken toward the corpse and Kåre Gjervan leaning down and touching the pendant Kristiane Thorstensen wore around her neck.
In the bathroom he studied himself in the garish fluorescent light over the mirror. The bags under his eyes seemed to have grown larger, darker, and heavier, and his hair was too long. He kept putting off the trip to the barber, perhaps trying to ignore the fact that the gray had begun to extend far above his temples. Fine wrinkles radiated in all directions around his eyes when he squinted, and his eyes appeared more gray than blue, as if they’d never had any life in them. What was left of the man who had found Kristiane Thorstensen so many years ago? He supported himself on the sink and saw himself standing over Hege, who had lain on this very bathroom floor and whispered, as quietly as she could, so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear it, “Please, Tommy, don’t kill me.”
He had promised the dead girl that he would be a good person, and this was the result, sixteen years later. He moved his gaze toward the floor, where Hege had lain sprawled. He no longer had a clear memory of what he had actually done to her—only in flashes was he able to reconstruct small fragments of . . . what? Assault, he thought. There was no other word for it.
And there was no forgiving such a thing. An explanation, maybe, at most, but nothing else. If there really was an afterlife, he would be going the same way as the man who had killed Kristiane.
As if to punish himself he sat down on the couch, picked up the remote control, and hit “Play” on the documentary. The flickering images on the screen filled the dark room with a strange bluish light. He rewound to the reconstruction of the first murder in Tønsberg, where Rask stood out in the forest in Vestfold with a sheepish smile. Bergmann froze the image and zoomed in on the feminine face. He closed his eyes and saw himself.
“You and me, Anders,” he whispered to the TV screen. “We are nothing but animals.”
17
Arne Furuberget went to bed
in the guest room a little before three in the morning. His wife’s light snoring made it impossible for him to get to sleep. Now he lay there, waiting for the alarm clock to ring. The nearest neighbor had already tried to start his car. It had been snowing heavily all night, and his fool of a neighbor was the only person to break the almost divine stillness that four to six inches of snow could bestow upon humanity. He always left for work at quarter past six and had woken Furuberget every weekday for almost twenty years. Furuberget stroked his beard and almost had to smile at the Schadenfreude he felt when his neighbor couldn’t get his car started.
He decided to stay in bed a few more minutes. Finally he dozed off and disappeared down into a dark well of sleep.
His head ached fiercely when his phone’s alarm went off. Five minutes, he thought. I got at least five minutes of sleep.
Just as he set his feet on the cold parquet floor, it clicked. He knew exactly where he knew that name from.
“Maria,” he said to himself. “Edle Maria.” He noticed the goose bumps under his faded pajamas. He suddenly felt much older, as if he already had one foot in the grave.
Edle Maria. He pulled up one sleeve of his pajamas. The hair on his arm was standing straight up like hog bristle. I can hear the voice quite clearly, he thought.
He went over to the window and looked out toward the neighbor’s garage. The poor wretch had connected a starting device to the car battery. He stared blankly at the ox of a man for a moment, then ended up studying his own mirror image in the dark windowpane.
It just couldn’t be.
And yet.
He was quite sure. Yes, he was completely convinced that he remembered correctly.
He got dressed as if he had the Devil himself at his heels, skipping breakfast, and yes, even coffee. He woke his wife with a light kiss on the forehead, something he hadn’t done for years. Fortunately she was too tired to pull him down into bed, even though he thought that was what she was trying to do. We’ll soon be too old for such things, thought Furuberget, and rejoiced that the car started with no problem, purring like a cat, even though he’d forgotten to put on the engine warmer.