Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  By the time he parked the car at Ringvoll, the gloom had taken over again. He didn’t understand where those few minutes of sudden joy had come from.

  This is serious, he thought, unlocking the door to the archive in the basement.

  He wandered around the windowless room long enough to feel that his body was being emptied of oxygen. He understood little or nothing of these rolling shelves. Oh, he’d grown so old. This business with Rask had been too much for him. He was a psychiatrist, for Pete’s sake. He felt his own weakness creeping up on him like an assassin. There was too much of everything—of beige archive letters, numbers, filing codes, and the like. He no longer even remembered what year he was searching for.

  At a little past eight o’clock, he heard someone entering the code on the outside of the door.

  The administrative director looked at him as if he were a burglar she’d taken by surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” she blurted out.

  “I’m looking for a case. A patient record.”

  “Which patient?”

  “It was a long time ago. No one you know. A patient that’s no longer here.”

  As she came into the room, the heels of her shoes echoed in his head.

  But how? he thought. How?

  “How long ago?”

  “A few years.”

  “You’ll have to go to Brumunddal if the file is more than ten years old.”

  Furuberget avoided making eye contact. He had to get this cleared up. He simply had to get this taken care of before Christmas. He could not take this mistake with him to the grave, much less admit it to anyone before he was completely certain.

  He did not leave until two o’clock in the afternoon. Because of the gathering storm, the drive around Mjøsa took almost two hours, nearly twice the time it normally took. The stationary line across the Moelv Bridge reminded him of the Périphérique, the ring road around Paris. All he could see were the red taillights of the car ahead. The windshield wipers threatened to collapse under the weight of all the snow that had been falling for hours.

  The administration building of the Inland Hospital normally looked like a Soviet office block, but in the white inferno that was falling from the sky, it looked more like a stage set from a Christmas story. There were still lights on in most of the windows. Furuberget thought that they should make more of an effort to escape this endless cycle of work and get home to their wives and husbands and kids—and soon, because life would be over soon enough. It was over before you even took a breath. The only people who should be at work after four o’clock in the weeks leading up to Christmas are those who don’t have anything other than solitude to look forward to when they get home.

  Furuberget felt warm, almost feverish, as he got out of the car. He draped his overcoat over his forearm and opened the cuffs under his suit jacket. Either he was coming down with something, or it was the certainty that he was about to make an irreparable mistake gnawing at him from inside. His life had been threatened more times than he cared to remember, but Rask’s words had stuck in his mind. His inscrutable smile.

  “You’re dead,” he said to himself, almost spitting it out like one of his own patients on their way into psychosis. No, slaughtered. Wasn’t that the way Rask put it?

  He stomped the snow off his shoes on his way up the stairs.

  The wash lights inside the archive blinked a few times, as if to suggest that this was not a good idea. That he should let all this be, that he’d remembered wrong.

  “Turn off the lights when you leave,” said the young girl who showed him in. “And the photocopier takes a little time to warm up.” She smiled as she put on a stocking cap and turned up the collar on her old-fashioned coat—which was probably modern again by now—almost to her ears. She had shown him how the system worked. He hadn’t explained what he was looking for—not specifically at least; he simply gave her a time range for a case that “interested him.”

  “Have a good one, then,” she said from the door.

  It took him only half an hour to find the right file box. His palms were sweaty as he pulled out the papers, and he started when the old rubber band that held them in place suddenly broke.

  He found what he was searching for in week three of treatment.

  “I had no other choice.”

  He then read the caregiver’s assessment. Written off as situational psychosis. He pushed his shaggy hair off his forehead. Psychosis, yes. That was long ago.

  He continued to read. Strong medication. Too strong. Pure anesthesia. And discharged too soon. That was easy to see now.

  But the name. It was there. It had been mentioned one Tuesday morning.

  Asked for her name. Patient said Edle Maria. When I asked again, there was no confirmation until a few minutes later. She is often simply called Maria. But her name is Edle Maria. Her father wanted to name her Edle Maria.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  He made copies of the pages he needed and put the box back on the shelf, right where it belonged. Rask had caught him making mistakes. He mustn’t make any more.

  Back outside, he stood on the steps for a long time. The snow was gusting around him, and he was finally blue with cold. The folder holding the patient record was getting wet in the infernal snowstorm. He stuck it under his coat and walked reluctantly toward the car, which now looked like an igloo.

  He brushed snow off it with the old snow brush. His movements were slow, as if all this mental illness had suddenly aged him.

  He turned on the reading light in the car. He wanted to assure himself just one last time that it really added up.

  “The patient says, ‘Edle Maria is alive.’”

  He took out his phone and started entering the number for information. When someone picked up on the other end, he hung up.

  Was that what had been in the letter to Rask?

  Yes, he thought. He recalled a fragment. Something about Medusa.

  Medusa’s tears.

  Edle Maria.

  Had she been a Medusa?

  18

  It was said that dreams showed your real nature in which nothing was held back, an unvarnished truth held up to the dreamer. When Bergmann’s alarm clock went off, he found himself hoping it wasn’t true. What had he dreamt? He tried to let it go. Was it the truth about himself?

  The wool blanket he’d placed over himself before he fell asleep had slipped to the floor. The room was still warm enough that he could lie there for a few more hours. Through the living room windows he could just glimpse that it was still snowing, even more heavily than the night before. Perhaps that meant the worst of the cold had released its hold on the city.

  He turned on his side and saw the same images of Anders Rask pass over the TV screen—the pictures from the woods in Vestfold and his half-cruel, half-infantile smile. A shiver went through him, not because of Rask’s face, but because the TV was still on, the VHS tape still playing.

  Hadn’t he turned it off before he fell asleep?

  Maybe not. For a moment he was unable to remember what had happened. If he’d fallen asleep with the TV on, the video must have rewound itself and started to play again.

  He got up, found the remote control, and started to fast-forward, but stopped after a few seconds. What was he doing? Could someone have been in the apartment while he was sleeping? He snorted at the outrageous thought, but nonetheless went out into the hall and felt the front door. For a moment he thought it was open, but no. The old door creaked when he pulled on it one more time. It was the original door from when the building was new back in the late fifties. The lock was only a simple spring latch. With a little poking anyone could open it from the outside. Hege had always wanted to replace it, but he’d considered it unnecessary—after all, who did he need to be afraid of in this world? Maybe that was why she wanted to replace it, he thought as he settled down in a kitchen chair and fished the last cigarette out of a pack on the table. Because the door was so thin and the neighbo
rs could easily hear them when their arguing was at its worst.

  A memory of Hege flashed across his mind’s eye—how she’d stood by that very door on the last day. He had been sitting just as he was now, after another night of hell. He knew that she wasn’t coming back ever again. Maybe it was her look, which was filled more with pity than hate. And he, of all people, just sat there as if chained to the chair. After she’d left for work, he started crying. A child’s crying, he thought now.

  “Damn,” he said out loud. The clock on the stove showed that he’d puttered around too long. He would have to take a taxi to police headquarters in Grønland; he couldn’t get there late, not today, not in this case.

  Before he got in the shower, he surveyed the apartment. The bedroom was untouched. Living room and guest room likewise—at least, he didn’t see anything that didn’t add up. He opened one of the drawers in the old dresser Hege had bought at a flea market. The few thousand-kroner bills he had stashed in there, God knows why, were still there. He turned around and scanned the living room one more time, searching for the slightest change. He studied the bookcases and the few photographs he kept there, the coffee table, the chairs by the dining table. He stared at the TV. He considered briefly whether Anders Rask had slipped out on leave. That was madness, but madness wasn’t unprecedented in this country.

  He shook himself. Rask had simply gotten one of the cases reopened. For the time being, he was still serving a sentence for all six murders.

  Even so, he thought. The TV and the VCR could not simply have turned themselves on.

  Had he really turned them both off before he fell asleep on the couch?

  19

  Elisabeth Thorstensen thought she could sit like this for hours, completely still with her head cocked, and stare at the birds outside the window. They flocked to the birdfeeder that Asgeir had set up—which Kristiane had made in woodshop.

  Which Peter made in woodshop, she thought, straightening her head. She lit a cigarette while she tried to remember what the birds were called. She gave up at once. You can’t stand birds, have you forgotten that? She had once stepped on a bird, a big black devil she’d found on the terrace. It was light as air under her shoe. She could still remember how she’d felt as she poked out its eyes. They looked like buttons on either side of the oblong head, and she had wanted to sew them onto her coat. That would have been something, black bird eyes on the ugly beige coat they’d bought for her.

  “Is everything okay, ma’am?”

  She shifted her gaze listlessly, noticing as she did so that the movement almost made her lose her depth perception. Valium had that effect on her. She’d taken half a tablet, just to get to sleep, but still woken up after two hours. The pill’s active ingredients no longer had any effect on her.

  “Don’t call me ma’am. You know I hate that.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Elisabeth narrowed her eyes.

  Rose covered her mouth and walked over to the dishwasher. Elisabeth thought she’d seen fear in her eyes. Had she turned ugly? She put out the cigarette and went out to the hall. She waited beside the mirror for a while before she dared look at herself.

  She closed her eyes in sheer delight at the sight. Beautiful, she thought. Wasn’t that what Asgeir had said to her just this morning? She’d come down from her room to say good-bye to him. For a moment she felt a flash of happiness, the kind she hadn’t felt since she was at the hospital with Kristiane at her breast.

  “Promise me one thing, Rose.” She stood in the doorway as Rose continued emptying the machine. “Never be afraid of me. Never.”

  Rose set down a glass on the counter. She smiled. It looked sincere enough.

  “Of course not.”

  “If I lose you, I lose everything.”

  Rose pushed a lock of hair from her forehead. Elisabeth went over to her and took her hand.

  “Never.”

  She put her arms around Rose. Though she tried not to cry, she was unable to hold back the tears.

  “Don’t be sad,” said Rose.

  You should have been there, thought Elisabeth. You should have been there and taken care of me. How old were you then? You weren’t even born. Even your parents were still children.

  Finally she let go of Rose and took a step back.

  “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  Now Rose was crying too.

  Elisabeth knew that she would have to let her return to the Philippines someday. Rose had a five-year-old son there, who lived with his grandparents.

  But no, she could never let Rose go.

  She left Rose to her housework and headed into her office. That dreadful letter was still on the desk. She had let Asgeir read it to her, though she already knew what it said.

  We wish to inform you of the commission’s decision of December 10, 2004, to grant Anders Rask’s request to retry the decision made in the Eidsivating Court of Appeals on February 22, 1994.

  She read the words “counsel for the victim” out loud to herself. For the first time since she’d received the letter, she managed to read it without feeling anything. It was only letters on a piece of paper, nothing else, nothing that concerned her.

  She looked out toward the fjord as her fingers caressed the sheet of paper, as if it would bring Kristiane back to life. The world seemed drained of color, a palette limited to gray and black. Even the frosty mist that hung over the dark, still water looked gray, not white. How many days was it since she’d last seen the sun?

  She closed the office door and picked up the receiver of the old landline phone. She listened for a moment to make certain that Rose hadn’t picked up the receiver of the phone down the hall.

  She entered his cell-phone number. After three or four rings he answered. His voice was slightly affected, in a way that she knew meant that he was in a meeting. He could have ignored the call, but chose to take it.

  It was all she needed to feel happy.

  “I have to see you.”

  He hung up without saying a word.

  Seconds later she started to cry.

  She lowered her head to the desktop and closed her eyes. Kristiane’s face appeared behind her eyelids. “Don’t be sad, Mom. There was nothing you could have done.” The voice was a child’s, a small child’s, but Elisabeth was not afraid of it. It was the middle of the day. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  She was startled by a sudden sound right by her ear. Kristiane’s voice faded, along with the image of her. It took a moment before she realized that the sound was coming from the landline phone beside her.

  She held it in her hand and stared at the eight digits. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t a cell-phone number.

  Even through the closed door and from down the hall, she thought she could hear Rose’s steps heading toward the hall phone. She carefully set it down and suddenly felt an all-consuming chill. She stood up and opened the door, then walked with quick but controlled steps to the stairs, moving a little more quickly with each step.

  Sure enough, though she couldn’t possibly really have heard Rose’s steps from her office, Rose was leaning over the phone in the hall. Elisabeth stopped on the top step.

  “Don’t answer it,” she said quietly.

  Rose evidently didn’t hear her because her arm moved toward the phone.

  “Don’t answer it!”

  Rose jumped with fright, almost falling over the writing desk on which the phone sat. They stared at each other until the person on the other end had hung up.

  Elisabeth was unable to hold back the tears at the sight of Rose’s face.

  You promised me, she thought, that you wouldn’t be afraid of me.

  20

  Bergmann fixed his gaze on the poinsettia in front of him. He closed his eyes, but regretted it immediately as the images from last night’s dream came flooding back, how he had stuck the knife in her again and again, as deep and as hard as he could. The police chief’s gentle voice filled the office. She
was reading a story from today’s Dagbladet about the incompetence and tunnel vision of the police. He was still worn out and sweaty after last night, or had he started sweating again in the taxi, on his way down to headquarters? He didn’t remember, only remembered having looked at the cross hanging from the rearview mirror—or was it another place, in Tuscany that summer, that summer Hege thought she was pregnant, and he was so happy, for a few days anyway. For a few wonderful days, he was able to forget, to forget how sick he’d been, but when they came home, he’d broken his promise again.

  Why?

  Bergmann didn’t know. He was thirty-nine years old and didn’t know a damn thing about himself. He wasn’t even able to separate his feelings, couldn’t distinguish between how he felt standing in a pitch-dark forest in 1988, looking down at a fifteen-year-old girl who would never age another day and who’d been deprived of all human dignity, and the feeling he got sitting here sixteen years later in the police chief’s office, almost shaking with nausea at the fact that he—of all people—would get the chance to straighten it all out again.

  He rubbed his face hard, almost frantically. Then he observed the gathering around the table once more. His colleagues were serious, fake, pathetic, and simply in love with their own careers. Sometimes he thought they didn’t give a shit about the countless victims who’d been killed, raped, and assaulted; they stepped on them as they climbed up the ladder. Up, up, that was all they knew, without a thought for those who were heading in the opposite direction.

  Reuter’s cheeks were slightly red as he sat beside Bergmann. He observed Reuter for a moment and felt a pang of contempt for how the man pretended to be following along as the police chief read. He moved his gaze to the chief. She adjusted the small reading glasses that were perched on the tip of her nose, and read the article with feeling. Bergmann felt as though he was back in the classroom in elementary or middle school. In fact, if you removed the portrait of King Harald and Queen Sonja from the wall behind her, her office could probably have passed for an average classroom, with its light-birch furniture, red woolen seat cushions, and dull art lining the worn plaster walls that dated back to the seventies.