by Gard Sveen
A wild thought struck him: Was it his own father they were searching for?
For a few seconds Bergmann saw himself as a child, someplace in northern Norway. It was the middle of the night, and he and his mother had run away. She had packed their clothes in an old sailor bag, and a car picked them up. She cried the whole way, hiding her face from him, even though it was dark in the car. Had a man driven them? The howling from a psychiatric institution flashed through his mind.
But was it a real memory, or just something he’d constructed after the fact?
Bergmann waved away some reporters who had jumped out of their cars as he approached the gate. It was snowing horizontally now, and Mjøsa was invisible, buried in whiteness.
“No comment,” he barked as he showed his ID to the two uniforms standing guard at the gate.
It was not Arne Furuberget who met him at the guardhouse, but a man who introduced himself as the hospital’s second-in-command, Thorleif Fiskum. His face looked like a death mask.
“Where’s Furuberget?” said Bergmann.
“He left an hour ago. He said that his wife wasn’t feeling well, she called and asked him to come home. Besides, he’d been here all night and was exhausted. He’s coming back this afternoon.”
“So he’s at home?”
“This is terrible,” he said quietly and shook his head. “Betrayed by one of our own, Bergmann.”
He nodded. There wasn’t much he could say.
“She regrets it, naturally. Rask had promised her that no one would be harmed. She was stupid enough to believe him.”
Fiskum sank down in a chair in Furuberget’s office. Another man was already sitting there; he introduced himself as the investigation leader from Gjøvik. Bergmann thought that it wouldn’t be long before this man was no longer investigation leader of anything at all in this case.
They spent a few minutes discussing how Rask and Jensrud could have managed to escape, which Bergmann could only bear to spend time on out of politeness. The most important thing now was that they had escaped. Whether Jensrud managed to make a knife out of materials in the workshop, or whether one of the female employees had been in love with Rask, was of no interest to Bergmann. The only thing he cared about was finding Rask. In principle they could be anywhere at all, maybe even Sweden, but Bergmann was pretty sure they were in Oslo. And either Rask had been in his apartment, or another man had been there. The killer they were searching for. His own father? Bergmann almost snorted at his thoughts. Pull yourself together, he thought. But it couldn’t be Rask. Someone had broken the lock on his basement compartment a good day before Rask escaped. That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
“I’d like to see Rask’s room,” said Bergmann.
“We’ve already gone through the room,” said the investigation leader from Gjøvik.
“I’d like to see Rask’s room,” Bergmann repeated, as if he were autistic.
A few minutes later, a psychiatric nurse came by to get him. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his gaze evasive. It was clear that he’d been crying.
Bergmann walked calmly behind the nurse, keeping his eyes fixed on the bottle-green linoleum, and had the exact same thought he’d had the day before: I’ve been here before, or a place just like this.
They passed the security passage into the security ward. He stopped midway through the corridor when he heard the steel door close behind him and turned around slowly.
He’d been in a place like this with his mother.
Maybe not right here, but a place like this.
But where? And when?
The guard held him back when he had opened the door to Rask’s room.
“I promised not to say anything,” said the nurse. He lowered his eyes.
“Say what?”
“Furuberget was in here a few days ago.”
He waited, clearly assuming that Bergmann understood the significance of this revelation.
“Yes?”
“He was searching for something while Rask was in the workshop. A letter. I’ve never seen him so desperate. He carried on for almost two hours.”
“A letter Rask had received?”
The nurse nodded.
“Did he find it?”
“No. He searched everywhere. I stood outside here and watched him for the last ten minutes. Things were all over the place, he’d even taken the cover off the mattress and taken half the bed apart.” The nurse demonstrated how he’d observed Furuberget by pulling open the viewing hatch in the door.
“Okay. Shut the hatch again,” said Bergmann, closing the door behind him. He had no need to share his thoughts with the nurse.
He spent a few minutes getting oriented in the sparsely furnished room. There were few places to hide anything in there. The bed had tubular legs, but Furuberget had already searched there. Apart from the bed, the bookcase was the most obvious hiding place.
Bergmann looked at the clock and thought he should call Furuberget, rather than start turning the room upside down himself. But there must be a reason he wanted to keep the search for the letter secret. If Bergmann didn’t find the letter himself, Furuberget would certainly deny the whole thing.
On the top of the bookcase at the very back was a kind of photo album. Bergmann pulled it out and set it on the desk by the window. It turned out to be a bizarre scrapbook of clippings, which Bergmann could not fathom that Furuberget had allowed Rask to keep.
On the first page Rask had pasted a newspaper clipping from Tønsbergs Blad in August 1978—now old and yellowed—about the murder of Anne-Lee Fransen. The following pages contained several clippings about the same girl from other newspapers. Anne-Lee had evidently bicycled home from the house of a girlfriend who lived in another part of Tønsberg; it was dark when she left, but she had a dynamo and a light and often got around that way. The bicycle was found a year later, on a forest road not far from where Anne-Lee’s body had been found. In a newspaper story later that year, Kripo speculated that the murderer had retrieved the bike in Tønsberg after he’d killed Anne-Lee, and brought it to the vicinity of the murder site. Bergmann remembered that Rask had said in court that he went back and retrieved the bicycle after he’d killed her out in the woods. Then followed a series of clippings with pictures of Anne-Lee. The next pages were filled with clippings of the three young prostitutes who were killed, but since they were prostitutes, there wasn’t much information about them. The press didn’t used to print in-depth stories on sixteen- or seventeen-year-old street girls who were killed. Two of them were also known in the heroin community and therefore were of little interest to the press. If it had happened today, they probably would have dug up a dysfunctional family and some old class pictures of a pretty elementary school girl from someplace in western Norway. But back then they were nothing but incipient heroin-using wrecks who staggered over to a car on Stenersgata one night in June, in too-short denim miniskirts and high-heeled cork shoes with needle marks up their arms. It was the three schoolgirls—Anne-Lee, Kristiane, and a girl by the name of Frida from Skedsmokorset, who was killed three years later—who had been the object of popular sympathy.
Most of the clipping book, fifteen to twenty pages, consisted of newspaper clippings covering the killing of Kristiane Thorstensen. The newspapers had somehow found their way to Ringvoll Psychiatric and into the room of the very man who was convicted of killing her. Bergmann thought that Rask had collected all this right after the murder; perhaps it was formerly confiscated material that had been returned to him after the judgment was legally binding. The final clippings, of Frank Krokhol’s stories about Kristiane and the reopening of the case, were only a few days old.
Bergmann tried to get over his irritation that Rask had been allowed to sit in here with this memory album, and instead concentrate on the places Rask had underlined in the articles. He found no particular connection between them, no pattern in what had caught Rask’s attention. He slammed the album shut and spent the next fifteen minutes searching for
hiding places where Rask could have tucked away letters or small scraps of paper. He checked the bookcase for holes, whether the flooring was loose anywhere, whether there was room to slide a sheet of paper between the wardrobe and the wall.
“Nothing,” he muttered. At last he took out the little Swiss army knife he kept in the pocket of his bubble jacket. He’d gotten it on a trip to Bern with the police association one time, and it came in handy sometimes. Like now, for example. He guided the knife blade into Rask’s mattress and sliced along one side lengthwise. He pulled off the top part of the mattress and looked down into every single spring.
He turned back toward the bookcase.
A final attempt, he thought. One by one he pulled out the ten or twelve books and held them by the spine, so that he could flip the pages. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a damn thing.” He picked up the thick red book titled The Book of the Law, as an absolute last resort. The name of the author seemed familiar.
As he started browsing through the thin pages, he became aware of the thickness of the book cover between his left thumb and index finger.
He sat down at the desk and set the book down carefully, as if it were the most fragile object in the world. He ran his index finger along the edge of the yellowed end sheet inside the front cover and pulled it away from the cardboard underneath it. And there it was. The letter was tucked between the end sheet and the cardboard in the binding.
Anders Rask must have somehow removed the glue from the thin sheet, stuck the letter under it, and then glued it all back in place.
Bergmann stared at the letter, motionless, for a few seconds. He unfolded the paper carefully, taking hold of it at the very top edge so as not to destroy any fingerprints.
He skimmed through the text. An undated letter. Neat handwriting, perhaps a fountain pen. But who had written it? Was it Rask himself? Bergmann held the stationery up toward the ceiling light between his thumb and index finger. It looked quite new. The paper was nowhere close to being yellowed. He walked backward toward the bed and read the letter more slowly this time, word by word.
By the time you read this, I may already be dead.
I have always known that it must be you. Just as Jesus himself chose the man who would betray him, perhaps I picked you back then.
This Devil’s gift that I have received will be my curse, but that’s nothing you know anything about. No one can know anything about it, perhaps not even me?
A gift is a gift, it’s not something either of us ever asked for. Only the giver can control a gift, and if the giver is God himself, what can the rest of us do?
You have a gift yourself, my boy, did you know that?
Like me, you never asked for it.
The way no child has ever asked to be born.
Oh, child . . . why did I write that?
When I was little—it doesn’t feel like very long ago—I went to have my fortune told by a gypsy woman in a traveling carnival. She stared at my open palms, then folded them again. “You don’t need to pay,” she said, and shooed me out. She told my mother that I was too young for such things, too young to get my fortune told. She had made a mistake when she took me in. Think how unhappy this made me, my boy, that this gypsy woman wouldn’t tell my fortune.
From where I live, the sea looks black, no foaming waves . . .
I tore the newspaper to bits when I saw her face again.
What do you think that fortune-teller saw in my hands?
That everything had a meaning?
That her tears were only Medusa’s tears?
Who wrote this?
It must have been Rask.
Or had someone written the letter to Rask?
Bergmann shivered at the thought. Had Rask hidden the letter there so that he would find it? Did he know Rask from before?
He read the text again. “What do you think that fortune-teller saw in my hands?”
A woman, he thought. Is that a woman’s handwriting?
He folded up the letter and left Rask’s room as quickly as he could, as though suddenly afraid of being locked in there himself.
The nurse was still standing outside.
“Where does Arne Furuberget live?”
“Don’t know.”
“Get me out of here.”
He read the letter again in the security passage: “From where I live, the sea looks black.”
Now he was quite sure. This must be a woman’s handwriting. And Medusa? Wasn’t that also a woman?
He refrained from showing the letter to the second-in-command and the investigator from Gjøvik. They had to focus on the escape, and it seemed that was more than enough for them.
“Where does Furuberget live?”
He got the address and directions, and the second-in-command drew a crude map of how to find it on the back of an envelope.
In the car he set the envelope containing the letter in the glove compartment, on top of the unregistered Raven pistol.
The letter must have been written by someone who knew Anders Rask from before.
A name appeared in his mind.
Jon-Olav Farberg. Rask’s colleague at Kristiane’s school. What was it he’d said? A cryptic story about some friend of Rask’s, Yngvar.
But no, Yngvar was no woman. And this had to be a woman’s handwriting.
Bergmann snorted as he drove through downtown Skreia. He barely noticed the wreaths and store displays on the main street all decorated for Christmas.
After seven or eight minutes he turned onto a forested road. Two houses were off by themselves. There were no lights on in any of the windows. The house to the left, where Bergmann had been told that Furuberget lived, didn’t even have an outdoor light on.
He turned off the car radio and the engine, and the car glided soundlessly over the fresh snow on the gentle downhill incline. He put on the brakes when he was a dozen or so yards from the house. Over at the neighbor’s the outside light was on, and a car was snowed in in front of the garage.
He stayed in the car for several minutes looking for movement in the windows. First in Furuberget’s house. Then the neighbor’s. He opened the glove compartment and fumbled his way to the Raven pistol, keeping his eyes fixed on the Furuberget house as he did so. Then he turned his headlights back on.
Fresh tire tracks on both sides of the road led to Furuberget’s house. He turned off the lights, opened the car door, and got out of the car, watching the dark windows the entire time. He released the safety on the pistol and took a couple of steps between the four tire tracks. The tracks on the right side were more snowed over than those on the left.
Damn, he thought. He’d passed a car on his way up here, but didn’t remember what kind it was. He started to walk quickly toward Furuberget’s house, running the last few feet. The steps were slippery, and he took hold of the railing so as not to fall, nearly dropping the pistol as he did so.
He paused for a few seconds, then took hold of the door handle with the sleeve of his bubble jacket to avoid destroying fingerprints.
The door was unlocked and opened with a creak on the poorly oiled hinges. He stepped quietly into the entry with the pistol in position and turned on the light switch.
A pair of slippers stuck out of a door down the hall, and a pool of blood ran toward the kitchen on a floor that must not have been quite level.
Bergmann stayed close to the wall as he brought the pistol up and turned his head from side to side.
Arne Furuberget lay on his stomach with his legs over the threshold of the doorway. His head was turned to the side and resting in his own blood. His throat was slit up to his ear, and his blazer was dark with blood. In front of him on the floor were broken coffee cups, a silver carafe, coffee grounds, and a crushed cookie.
Bergmann leaned down and felt Furuberget’s hand. It was still warm.
Damn. What kind of car did he pass? A passenger car, that was all he remembered. Midsized.
He went back through the hall. I wonder if the wife really
was sick, he thought.
He opened the first door to the left, then pushed it all the way open with his foot as he held the pistol in a two-handed grip. A guest room. Empty.
The wife was in the next room, her throat cut as well. But she was in much worse shape than her husband. Her face was almost gone. He couldn’t bear to turn on the light. Instead, he lowered the pistol, took out his phone, and called the emergency number. After a brief conversation, he called Fredrik Reuter and told him about the letter he’d found in Rask’s room.
“Strictly speaking, this is not our case, Tommy. I have to talk to Svein. He’s trying to—”
Bergmann hung up.
He jumped at a knocking sound coming from the basement. Three knocks.
He went over to the stairs that led down to the basement and told himself that it was just the oil furnace. Then he took a seat halfway down the stairs with the pistol aimed toward the darkness below.
When he saw a blue light rotating in the windows on the first floor, he stuck the Raven pistol in his inside pocket, went outside to greet the officers, and took one of them down with him to the basement.
It was empty, and all the doors were locked.
Up in the living room the sheriff made the same observations as Bergmann.
“The visitor killed him. He would never have made coffee for Anders Rask, don’t you think?”
Bergmann shook his head.
The investigator from Gjøvik eventually arrived, along with Furuberget’s second-in-command at Ringvoll.
“It’s Rask,” said the investigator.
“Would you have made coffee for Rask?” asked the sheriff. Bergmann felt like giving the man a pat on the shoulder.
“What kind of car did Rask and his buddy escape in?” he asked the investigator.