Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  But perhaps he was being too harsh. Hanne Rodahl seemed sincerely indignant about Dagbladet’s article; it appeared that her desire to find Kristiane Thorstensen’s killer was sincere. And because of the media’s hard-line, the police chief now obviously had a fire under her to get this solved, ignited by people who stood higher on the ladder than she did.

  That was how the world worked these days, or at least that was how it had become: the press decided to pursue a case, and headquarters followed like a driverless sled behind a pack of Siberian huskies. Dagbladet had already assumed full reparation and release for Rask and fired off a broadside almost without parallel in that day’s editorial.

  “‘Not only were they able to get Anders Rask convicted on a completely unsound basis, but the police also ought to ask themselves: If Rask did not kill Kristiane or any of the other girls, don’t we have a disturbed child murderer running loose in Norway? And now the police are faced with yet another murder of a young girl, over ten years after he was convicted. PR at police headquarters answered Dagbladet’s questions about the case in only the vaguest of terms, which makes it difficult to avoid asking the obvious question once again: Do we have a disturbed child murderer running loose in this country?’”

  The police chief stopped reading, took a deep breath, carefully took her reading glasses off her nose, and folded them in her hand.

  Silence followed. They all sat there, seven men and one woman, staring at the slightly withered poinsettia, as the clock on the wall seemed to tick closer to a defeat.

  “They show as much consideration for the survivors as they always have,” said Hanne Rodahl, weighing the reading glasses in her hand.

  Bergmann shifted his gaze and stared blankly at the room; there wasn’t much to see, but he couldn’t bring himself to respond to her half-dejected smile. Besides, he was on the lowest rung of the ladder of everyone in the room. Not that he usually cared much about such things, but he felt a little like the teacher’s pet when he thought about why he was sitting here. Reuter had come into his office yesterday and told him where things stood. The attorney general thought he should be ready to take up the whole Rask case again on very short notice, but naturally wanted to wait to make the official decision until it was clear they had something more to go on than they did eleven or twelve years ago, when Rask had cracked under questioning by the Oslo police, was investigated by Kripo, and convicted. This time, said Reuter, the attorney general wanted the Oslo police to coordinate the investigation—if there was a new investigation—but would launch it as discreetly as possible. Oslo had been the district of choice because five of the girls were killed within its boundaries. Or rather, they had disappeared from Oslo. Bergmann had thought the decision was a purely bureaucratic one until Reuter added, “Papa Rodahl is pointing at you, Tommy. She wants you on the case.” Reuter often made fun of the police chief behind her back by putting her code name before her surname. Still, that was better than Madame Saddam, as she was referred to in the patrol cars.

  “This Rask gives me the creeps,” said Rodahl, if only to break the silence. Bergmann sensed that she really didn’t want to have this case on her hands. He understood her perfectly. It was like being a freebooter in hell. “Are we quite certain it’s not really him?”

  “He’s going to be acquitted for the murder of Kristiane Thorstensen,” said Finneland, who sat at the opposite short end of the table. “Now that he’s gotten it reopened, it’s over. Let there be no doubt about that. If I’m not mistaken, he’ll be acquitted in the next case too. That either means that Rask will eventually go free for murders he actually has committed—but that we can’t prove he’s behind—or that the real murderer, or murderers, is still among us. What I want to know is whether Rask has done what he’s convicted of, evidence or no evidence, or whether we should be chasing another man. The same man who killed Daina at Frognerveien. We’ll split up, Hanne. We’re being attacked on two fronts, and we have to defend ourselves on two fronts. If we find the answer in one of the cases, I think we’ll solve both. Sørvaag will continue with the Daina case, regardless of what a dead end that might be, and Bergmann will find gold in the old Kristiane case.”

  “But why Kristiane?” said Rodahl to no one in particular.

  “Exactly,” said Finneland. “Why Kristiane?”

  “You think Kristiane is the key,” said Bergmann, looking at Finneland.

  The prosecutor’s eyes narrowed, then lit up.

  “You think fast, Bergmann. I like people who think fast. Yes, I’ve asked myself the question why Rask chose Kristiane in particular. Why is she the one he’s convinced he didn’t kill? Is there something he’s trying to tell the outside world?”

  “You think he’s withholding information?” said Bergmann.

  Though Finneland smiled, Bergmann wasn’t sure that he liked his expression.

  “You can console yourself with the fact that that’s exactly what you’re going to find out, Bergmann.”

  Finneland presented this impossible task as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Though he was officially responsible for the Oslo prosecutor’s office, Finneland was also the attorney general’s appointee, and, according to rumors, the one who actually made the decisions in the country’s highest prosecutors’ office. That his nickname in the patrol cars was Pussyland was hardly a surprise to anyone. In addition to being an arrogant bastard, he was known for hitting on all the female attorneys in the department whenever he felt like it. He was good-looking—that could not be denied—and he was in good shape besides. And he had a lot of power, far too much power. That sort of thing has always worked as a chick magnet, thought Bergmann. That explained a lot.

  “You know what I mean, Svein,” said Rodahl. “He’s a swine, a misogynistic swine and a child abuser, and he’s stark raving mad to boot. I can’t escape the feeling that he’s fooled—”

  “Kripo?” said Finneland.

  “Us,” said the police chief. “All of us. I really think he’s the one who killed all those girls, Svein.”

  “Not Daina,” said Finneland.

  “The perpetrator didn’t cut off her fingers. And she wasn’t as injured as—”

  “For God’s sake, he didn’t have time, Hanne. He was interrupted by a man we’re unable to find. We’re never going to find the caller, no matter how much money we put up for a reward. When are you going to realize that?”

  Finneland sighed dejectedly and steepled his long fingers. A broad wedding ring appeared to have grown into the ring finger on his right hand. In a flash Bergmann was back in the patrol car sixteen years ago; he still remembered the sight of the solitary Christmas star in the window, the dark figure by the roadside, the sound of Kåre Gjervan’s wedding ring as it hit the gearshift. I should have opened the car door, thought Bergmann, and run, run, vanished, never come back again.

  A tapping on the tabletop to his left startled him out of his thoughts. Reuter was fiddling with a pencil; his expression suggested he wished this meeting had never taken place.

  “You can think what you want, Hanne,” said Finneland. “I want to schedule another meeting for next week.”

  He threw his briefcase on the table, then glanced at the pulse monitor on his wrist. Bergmann knew that if Finneland were to succeed in finding Kristiane’s real murderer—whether by producing new evidence against Rask or by finding someone else guilty—the path to the office of the Director General of Public Prosecutors would be wide open. Finneland couldn’t care less about Kristiane, or anyone else for that matter. Career was everything to him.

  “I’m counting on you to get me something within the week, Bergmann,” he said, getting up. “Because a week is all you have.”

  Bergmann heard Reuter’s pencil break. The detective superintendent who sat across from them cleared his throat, as though suddenly allergic to that poinsettia standing between them. Not a word had been said about how this discreet, so-called preparatory investigation would be conducted, but it was now obvious
to everyone that the police chief had already given Finneland both the name and number of the man she expected to find water in the desert.

  “In a week’s time, I want an answer from you to the question of whether there’s anything to pursue or not, do you understand? Normally I would have recommended that we fight tooth and nail to defend the old conviction against Rask. But that will be like pissing in your pants to stay warm. One week, that’s it. And for God’s sake keep quiet about this as long as you can.” Finneland talked in a way that brought Bergmann’s thoughts back to boot camp in the military, a life that consisted entirely of curt commands and no room for doubt whatsoever.

  Finneland continued, “I’d like to see Rask stay locked up for the rest of his life. You can imagine for yourself what a defeat another failed investigation would look like. And sooner or later the dam in the Daina case will break. In the end I’m sure we’ll be pressured to open up the whole damned Rask case again, but I want us to forestall the Ministry of Justice from doing that as long as possible. We’re already on their backs about that.”

  Silence. No one appeared to want to speak. The seven others in the room seemed to be relieved that the whole question of whether the old Rask case would be resumed had become a matter between Chief Public Prosecutor Svein Finneland and Inspector Tommy Bergmann.

  “Tommy was there when Kristiane was found . . .” said the detective superintendent.

  Idiot, thought Bergmann.

  Finneland frowned and cocked his narrow head. Bergmann held his hand up in a dismissive gesture.

  “Resources?” said Bergmann. He cut open her belly, he thought, and mutilated her. The sound of the wedding ring against the gearshift, the sound of the plastic bags being pulled apart, the smell of Kristiane Thorstensen, how the birds had hacked at her but let her face be. How could such things happen?

  “You’ll take Susanne with you,” said Reuter, clearing his throat. “The two of you will be able to keep quiet. And she’s a bit more organized than you.”

  Cautious laughter followed. Bergmann caught a few glances being exchanged across the table, but didn’t quite understand what was going on. Rodahl smiled sheepishly at Finneland.

  “You’ll get resources here in the building,” said Finneland. “But keep a low profile. People brag about you, Bergmann, you should know that. If you have questions, call me, anytime, day or night. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week. Something needs to be on the table by then, something Kripo has overlooked.”

  Finneland placed a hard hand on Bergmann’s shoulder and squeezed.

  “Give me something that helps us find that bastard.”

  21

  Elisabeth Thorstensen had not exchanged a word with Rose since the episode with the telephone. She’d been sitting out on the terrace in her wolf-skin fur, looking out at the fjord, the islands Ulvøya and Malmøya, and Nesodden. She was sitting with an unlit cigarette in her hand when she heard a sound from the railway line below the house. Through the leafless hedge she could clearly see Kristiane knocking on the glass with her face pressed against the window of the train. Elisabeth got up and sprinted through the garden, still holding the cigarette in her hand. She tried to push apart the thick branches of the linden hedge, but only ended up scraping the backs of her hands. She brought her face up to the bare black branches and listened to the sound of the train dying away and the cars down on Mosseveien, the endless sounds of traffic, of life, of people who still had something to live for every day.

  She sucked up the blood from her hand. The sight of the blood, its sweetish taste and slight scent of iron, made her dizzy. She swayed into the hedge for a moment, then she blacked out.

  When she came to, she was lying on her back in the snow. A warm hand was holding hers. When she opened her eyes, the falling snow felt like it was slicing into her eyeballs.

  “Oh, Elisabeth,” said Rose.

  Elisabeth thought the sight was absurd. The beautiful woman wore just an apron, blouse, skirt, and a pair of slippers, her black hair covered with snow. She was so far north of her home.

  Go home, she thought, closing her eyes again. She still felt warm. In her fur, she could have lain outside like that for hours.

  “You haven’t answered the phone?” she said quietly.

  “No.”

  “Will you help me up?”

  Back inside, Rose undressed her in the second-floor bathroom.

  “Hang on to me,” said Elisabeth when she was completely naked. She studied the water in the bathtub, how it whirled under the faucet, foaming as if it were blood pouring out of a stomach. Her legs nearly failed her, and she stumbled into Rose.

  “Don’t leave me here. I need you to stay here while I bathe.”

  Rose stroked her forehead, and she sank down into the water. If Rose hadn’t been there, she would have simply submerged herself entirely and opened her mouth.

  Like in a dream the sound of the telephone rose up from the first floor again. It was like déjà vu from this morning. Elisabeth got out of the bathtub and observed herself in the mirror.

  “I’m still a good-looking woman, Rose, don’t you think?” She smiled carefully at the housekeeper.

  The sound from the phone went away.

  It could have been him.

  An hour later she reversed the new Mercedes Asgeir had bought for her out of the garage. Fifteen minutes later she drove onto Skøyenbrynet.

  She parked a few yards away from the old house, which was still painted red. A thin strip of gray smoke rose from the chimney. The disappointment slowly filled her. She just wanted to walk around the house and look into Kristiane’s room. And Alex’s. She closed her eyes and saw herself walking around inside the house, up the stairs, across the varnished pine floors of the hall, past the white walls hung with art that Per-Erik said she had spent far too much money on. Down to their rooms, all the way at the end.

  It was the strands of her hair. She couldn’t have mistaken them.

  She opened the car door and stepped out into the snow. The flakes were falling thickly now, and it was impossible to see beyond the neighboring house.

  Elisabeth opened the cast-iron gate and entered. After only a few steps she saw movements behind the kitchen window. For a few seconds she pictured herself standing in there. There had been some happy times, no?

  A voice inside her said it wouldn’t be dangerous to go down into the garden; no one would see her. But she remained standing as if paralyzed. Finally reason won out and she hurried back to the gate and closed it behind her.

  She drove away from the house, but stopped again outside the house of her old neighbors, the ones who probably knew what was going on, what Per-Erik did to her.

  She looked in the direction of where she lived now. She couldn’t see her house from here, but the fact that she lived in the vicinity of the old house was like a rape of Kristiane’s memory.

  Her wallet lay on the passenger seat. She took out Kristiane’s passport photo—the only picture she had of her. Alex had sent it to her last summer, without any warning. “I kept this picture,” he’d written.

  Had she given it to him?

  Why had he kept it, why had he kept things from Kristiane, and why hadn’t she?

  She took out her phone and searched for Alex’s number. Quickly, before she had time to think too much, she hit the “Call” button.

  His voice was distant, as if he were a different person. His “Hello” sounded more like a question than a greeting.

  “Have you seen it?” she said so quietly that she almost didn’t hear her own voice. She felt as though someone were staring at her from inside the house behind her. Kristiane, standing at the end of the hall, by the window. She saw everything, heard everything, even this conversation.

  Alex didn’t answer. She pictured him up there in Tromsø, what he looked like during this dark season, the fine features, the black hair. She had visited him just once when he was in medical school. He lived in a dreadful dungeon of a rented room on the ma
inland. Everything up there was dark, cold, a nightmare.

  “How could you do that?” she said.

  Only the static of the connection.

  “Elisabeth,” he said. Resigned, as if he were her father. The thought made her furious—what did he know about such things, what would he have done in her shoes? Then everything collapsed inside her.

  She started to cry, at first quietly, then uncontrollably.

  “Why can’t you just call me Mother again?”

  “Can you promise me one thing?” he said.

  She got her crying under control.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t ever call me again.”

  22

  After the meeting Bergmann sat inertly in the office. Outside the window there was only a white wall of snow, as if nothing existed beyond headquarters itself. Find something that Kripo overlooked back then. In a week.

  Forty percent of all men had blood type A. Bergmann himself had blood type A. Although 10 percent had the same enzyme profile as the perpetrator, only Anders Rask had two of the girls’ belongings—hair, notebooks—in his home. On the other hand, no skin was found under the nails of any of the victims before Daina. Maybe he’d tied their hands behind their backs as fast as he could. Knocked them unconscious first, pounded the sense out of them. Apart from Kristiane.

  Bergmann knew that he would need a team or two if he was to stand a chance of finding anything at all in a week. But he had only Susanne. And she hadn’t been of his own choosing. She was capable enough, but there was a limit to how much the two of them could accomplish in a week. If Susanne had her daughter this week, he might as well just give up now, as it would mean working day and night or more than that. If they only had some idea where to begin. The DNA profile found in and on Daina didn’t yield a match in the DNA registry, and all the evidence from the prior homicides had been destroyed. The old profile from the Kristiane case wasn’t specific enough to establish anything other than that it might be the same man in all the cases. With today’s technology, they might be able to get a bit more out of the DNA material. The problem was that the superior, self-righteous democracy of Norway destroyed evidence after a judgment was legally binding. In some cases it was turned back over to the family if they were possessions of the victim. But what family member took an item of clothing with evidence on it? Besides, in Kristiane’s case they’d only found DNA in and on her body. Her clothes had never been found.