Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  “Tell me about Anders Rask,” he said without turning toward Krokhol. “The only interview he’s ever given was with you.”

  Krokhol seemed preoccupied with his pipe. The aroma of the cognac-infused tobacco reminded Bergmann of his childhood best friend’s father.

  “Well, I never,” said Krokhol.

  “No leaks,” said Bergmann. The rule was simple. During an ordinary investigation involving lots of officers, a leak would have been hard to trace back to him. In a situation like this, however, he was a sitting duck.

  “Total radio silence?” said Krokhol.

  “I’ll give you what I can, but not now. You drive us hard enough as it is.”

  Krokhol smiled to himself.

  “So. It’s your job to dig into the Kristiane case?”

  Bergmann nodded, then took a hearty swig of his beer, perfectly tapped with a cap of foam, so that the carbonation was well preserved lower down in the glass.

  “I have an appointment up in Toten tomorrow.”

  “That should go pretty fast, I would guess. Well, Anders Rask . . . he’s just a simple pedophile,” said Krokhol. “A mama’s boy with a fondness for little girls and girls with developing tits, as well as stark raving mad with a pathological need to be important . . . When your people started believing him in the interviews, it snowballed, and he started to think he was bigger than Satan himself . . . He was a welcome prey for the prosecutor, Schrøder. There was a hell of a stir back then, and he was the perfect murderer. Though theoretically thousands of men could have killed those girls, he fit the bill a little too well. It’s no more complicated than that. Now he’s at Ringvoll and gets buckets of fan mail from crazy women all over the country.”

  “What about the things that were found at his home?”

  “He was a teacher to two of the girls, Bergmann. He brought little things home from school. He was obsessed with them. He didn’t have any of the whores’ belongings. Not Frida’s either—because he’d never met them, plain and simple. Besides, I think the whores were too old for him. Almost twenty. Well, the one was sixteen, but by then they’re almost fully grown. In the old days anyway. And the duct tape, who the hell doesn’t have a roll of duct tape around?”

  “Why do you have such strong feelings about him?” said Bergmann.

  “One: because I think he’s innocent, regardless of whether or not he’s a pig and a sexual predator, and two: because the real killer is still running loose among us, assuming he’s still alive.”

  Bergmann didn’t say anything.

  “And the worst thing,” said Krokhol, “the worst thing is that the one who killed Kristiane probably killed all the others too. Don’t you think he killed Daina, Bergmann? Why would you be so fucking reserved otherwise? Damn, I’ve seen the Rask documents a hundred times, but I can’t write about it, you know that. I would bet my bottom dollar that Daina was subjected to the same thing. Did he chop off her finger too? What is that? The index finger on the right hand, that was probably where he started this time.”

  Bergmann’s silence was revealing enough.

  “Tell me about the Daina case,” Krokhol whispered, trying to make eye contact with Bergmann.

  Bergmann just shook his head.

  “You’re on the wrong track, Tommy. Don’t tell me otherwise.”

  “If you write that, we’re through with each other,” said Bergmann.

  “How stupid do you think I am? And welcome back. I’ve been saying all this for years. Damn it, Rask barely managed to explain what happened. You’ve seen the recordings from Vestfold. He just stands there and points randomly, like any old fool. And the thing with the fingers, he guessed his way to that. Pure guesswork.”

  “You believe that?” said Bergmann, suddenly overcome with certainty that he had turned off the TV last night. He shook his head.

  “Believe?” said Krokhol. “On my mother’s and father’s graves. There is one man and only one you’re searching for, and that man is not Rask. There are too many similarities to be talk of multiple killers, and besides this is a small country, there simply aren’t that many crimes here. And if you don’t find him soon, he’ll take yet another girl. Right now he’s reading absolutely everything that’s been written about Kristiane and Daina, and he’ll eventually feel so much pressure that he won’t be able to restrain himself from killing again.”

  So the paradox is, thought Bergmann as Krokhol laboriously got up to go to the can, that if you hadn’t written so damned much about Daina and Kristiane and blown up those pictures of them all over the newspaper, then maybe he wouldn’t kill again.

  And I’ll never get the chance to settle accounts.

  “Do you think Rask has contact with anyone on the outside?” said Bergmann when Krokhol was back from the restroom.

  Krokhol leaned back in his chair. He took hold of the pipe with his right hand and started poking out the tobacco with a matchstick.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forget it.”

  “You think two people may have been involved in the murders, is that what you mean?”

  “I said forget it.”

  Bergmann knew he’d gotten all he would get out of Krokhol. It was time to go.

  When Bergmann got back to his office, he found his desk piled high with documents, arranged in a system with Post-it notes.

  He spent the next half hour going systematically through the contents of the folders. He could see that Susanne wasn’t done. But that was okay. Maybe she should go with him to see Anders Rask tomorrow.

  31

  “Mommy!” Susanne blinked a few times as Mathea turned over in her sleep next to her. But she had only imagined the scream. A nightmare again, but it didn’t usually happen this early in the evening. Mathea woke up every single night these days, without exception.

  Susanne looked at the luminous dial on the Tag Heuer watch she’d gotten from Nico as a gift the day after the wedding. It was already eight thirty. The skylight was covered with snow. Had it started snowing again? Or was it morning already?

  She turned on the night lamp without caring whether Mathea might wake up. The clock face showed that it was still the same date as when she’d fallen asleep. For a moment she had no concept of time or space.

  She turned off the light again and lay in bed thinking about Nico. About his face the first time she saw him. It wasn’t dangerous to think about him. No one could know what she was thinking.

  It was okay to have regrets.

  And she’d rarely regretted what she’d done more than right now.

  As she turned toward Mathea to curl up closer to her, images of Kristiane flashed across her mind. She looked at Mathea’s thick black eyelashes. She would hardly need mascara when she was a teenager, but that just made it worse: men would look at her, desire her, abuse her, until she would someday have to identify her child, lying in a metal box at the morgue, in a white crepe dress with her arms folded across her chest.

  She covered her face with her hands.

  The sound of her phone ringing rescued her.

  For the first time, it was comforting to hear Tommy Bergmann’s voice. There was definitely something wrong with him, but she had never doubted that he was a man who both could and wanted to protect people. She knew she could call him if she was ever truly afraid of anything.

  “We should probably keep each other informed of what we’re up to,” he said. “Besides, I’m going to Toten tomorrow.”

  Toten? She couldn’t help but smile. Then she got serious.

  “Anders Rask?” she asked.

  “I’m going to see him tomorrow.”

  She considered asking him why she couldn’t go along, but stopped herself. It was hard to escape the feeling that she had been put in the role of the old lady who stayed home and washed up while the men were out having fun. But there was nothing she could do to change that.

  She saw herself in the mirror, went out in the living room, and lay down on the couch.

  “I
didn’t get everything done today,” she said.

  “I saw that.”

  “I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

  Bergmann didn’t answer. An old dominance technique, thought Susanne. But damn if it doesn’t work.

  “I did something else this afternoon. I think maybe I’m on to something.” She told him about how she’d gone out to Brobekk in search of an old witness.

  “Oh?” He sounded surprised. She suddenly felt that she’d set herself up for failure.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said.

  “What are you on to?”

  “It’s just . . . Remember that there were two people who claimed they’d seen Kristiane the Saturday she disappeared?”

  Bergmann did not answer right away.

  Damn it all, she thought.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “I remember that. One of them was Bjørn-Åge Flaten. Bønna Flaten. I’ve driven that man to jail more times than I care to remember.”

  She twisted her hair together and let it out again.

  “What about him?” said Bergmann. She knew what he was going to say. It had been in the notes, between the lines, all along. He was an unreliable witness who was after money. That was why they’d dropped him from the investigation.

  Susanne didn’t say anything. She had nothing to say.

  “He was never anyone we could count on, Susanne. I knew perfectly well who he was in the old days.”

  When you and Bent worked patrol, she thought. She was so damned tired of the old stories. The old boys club. The response unit had been nothing more than a bunch of thugs. They beat up criminal immigrants and pushers without papers, wrote “resisted arrest” in the report, and all covered each other’s asses.

  “I just want to talk to him. He maintained that he saw Kristiane at Skøyen. Why would he say such a thing?”

  “Junkies like him are pathological liars. He was just looking out for his own interests. Then he went to Dagbladet when we didn’t believe him. He just wanted money. He probably got a thousand-kroner bill, but not a penny more. He retracted it all a week later. There was a hell of a stir in the papers, Susanne. It was before your time.”

  “Mommy!” she heard from the bedroom.

  “Well, so I’m going up to see Rask tomorrow. Can’t say that I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

  The hell you aren’t, thought Susanne. Damned men.

  “Why should Bjørn-Åge Flaten lie about seeing Kristiane?”

  “Mommy, I peed on myself.” Mathea now stood in the kitchen looking into the living room.

  She’d simply forgotten to send her to the bathroom after she’d had several glasses of milk with supper. She hadn’t started wetting the bed again. She hadn’t. Not really.

  “Give me a minute,” she whispered to Mathea. “No fussing now.” The feeling her mother had always tried to impress upon her overpowered her for a moment. She was a bad mother, that was all. A real shit mother. Not the kind of loving mother her sister, Line, surely would have been, if she’d just used a seatbelt and hadn’t been killed in a car wreck by her boyfriend almost twenty years ago.

  “Route 9,” said Bergmann into her ear. “Does that ring any bells?”

  “I’m from Asker,” said Susanne.

  “Route 9 went from Ljabru to Jar. It stopped at Sæter, and it stopped at Skøyen. Actually right by Amalienborg, where our friend Bønna lived at the time. If you were coming from the Nordstrand sports facility and going to Skøyen, wouldn’t you just have taken the trolley? I don’t think either of those two tricksters saw her, Susanne.”

  “She was seen at Nordstrand station. She took the train.”

  “Oh well, maybe she took the train then,” said Bergmann. “But we won’t get anywhere with this. The old man who saw her at Oslo Central Station is dead. I have no idea why she wouldn’t simply have taken the trolley to town, and deep down I still think that’s what she did. She could have been sitting with the hood of her college sweatshirt over her head. She could have been wearing a cap for all I know.”

  “No one wore a cap back then. It was social suicide,” she said.

  “Susanne,” said Bergmann. “Listen . . .”

  “But don’t you see that this is crucial? Don’t you get that?” She heard her own voice. It had risen, just as it had when she and Nicolay used to argue.

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Sorry. It’s just been a bit much.”

  Why? Why did she apologize? It was so typical of her, raised as she was to excuse herself for the least little thing, especially to men. It was as if she wanted to say, I’m really just a dumb little girl, sorry, sorry because I’m so dumb and lost control so fast.

  “Maybe she didn’t want to be seen, Tommy. Maybe that was why she went to all the trouble of taking the train, because there were certainly far fewer people there. Maybe Kristiane was doing something she didn’t want the other girls to know about, have you considered that? She was first out of the changing room. She didn’t want a ride in the direction of Godlia. Maybe she didn’t want to hang around in Sæter and wait for the trolley. No, she disappeared down the dark street and walked all the way down to the train. Because she knew that the train would take her straight to Skøyen.”

  Bergmann remained silent.

  “Okay, I’ll give you a chance.”

  “Thanks.”

  Maybe I ought to be your boss, thought Susanne. Just as soon as I’m finished with that master’s thesis.

  Bergmann hung up without another word.

  Susanne remained standing with the phone against her ear.

  “I’m cold,” said Mathea behind her. “Mommy.”

  The child, she’d completely forgotten her child.

  I’m cold too, thought Susanne. Her hands were actually shaking a little as she put down the phone. Maybe because she was a little afraid of Bergmann, when it came down to it. Maybe because she’d thought about Line, which was the last thing she wanted to think about. Maybe because I’m just as miserable a mother as my own mother makes me out to be. The child was shaking and already smelled of old pee.

  I had everything. And threw it away.

  After giving Mathea a shower, turning the mattress, changing the sheets, and putting her back to bed, she put on a song by the Motels, the one she almost never dared listen to, the one Line had always played when she had romantic troubles. She played it loud, so loud that Mathea could easily have woken up. Because nothing in this life would ever come back.

  She folded her hands and prayed that Bjørn-Åge Flaten could save her.

  32

  The sound of knocking was unmistakable, though hard to pinpoint. He had tried to ignore it, but could no longer do so. It even drowned out his wife, who was loudly humming an old song in the bathroom. He listened to the sound of the shower water through the half-open door, a splash in the bathtub. Humming.

  And once again the knocking.

  From downstairs.

  One, two, three times.

  Then silence.

  Either it was the pipes from the furnace, or else there was someone in the basement. A person who was rhythmically striking the pipes below. To lure him down there.

  Arne Furuberget lowered the newspaper and fixed his gaze on the doorway out to the hall. The living room was dark apart from the reading lamp by the old Børge Mogensen armchair he was sitting in.

  He took hold of the arm of the chair when the faint pounding sound came again.

  He counted to himself.

  One, two, three.

  Exactly the same rhythm every time.

  He sat frozen to the spot, incapable of moving. He studied his reflection in the dark living room window. Outside everything was black, but that was to be expected. Beyond the garden there was a field, and beyond the field there was only forest and more forest.

  He closed his eyes when the knocking sounds resumed. He got up from the chair and closed the double-lined curtains. He walked quietly across the living room floor
. He stopped in the hall and turned toward the bathroom, where Gunn was still humming the same melody. It was melancholy, he’d heard it many times before, but couldn’t think of what it was called. It soothed him momentarily. Until the knocking sound came again.

  He walked quickly to the entry porch and felt the front door.

  Locked.

  He exhaled.

  Who was he trying to fool?

  It was the basement door he was afraid of. The one that led out to the garden at the back of the house.

  He turned and reluctantly walked back into the hall.

  He stopped at the top of the stairs down to the basement. Everything was dark down there. For a few seconds Furuberget was paralyzed by the same fear he’d felt as a child, when his brother had locked him inside the pitch-dark storehouse.

  He snorted to himself and went down the concrete steps.

  When he was halfway, he had to hold onto the railing firmly.

  The sounds were now right beside him. The pipes to the furnace were attached to the basement ceiling.

  The knocking came again.

  The pipes seemed to undulate over him; then the metallic sound disappeared.

  He could see nothing. The basement was like a black sea below him. Straight ahead was the old bathroom the kids had used when they lived at home. They usually kept the light on in there, but now it was off.

  He took the last steps two at a time, nearly tumbling to the floor as he did so. His breathing was heavy now. He hated to admit it, but he’d been scared of this basement ever since they were here for an open house almost thirty years ago. It was narrow and labyrinthine. And at the very back, behind the TV room they rarely used anymore, was the furnace room with the oil boiler he had never been able to understand. The only way out from there was back through the TV room, down the labyrinthine corridor, past the laundry room, which had a door out to the garden, and up the stairs to the first floor.

  He found the light switch on the wall.

  The fluorescent ceiling light blinked a couple of times.

  He thought he saw someone in the laundry room. A face?

  No.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” he said, going toward the laundry room.