Hell Is Open (Tommy Bergmann Series Book 2)

by Gard Sveen

  “A Nissan Micra.” The investigator gave him a small, sad smile. Two madmen in a tin can of a car.

  “I passed a car on the way up here.”

  “Yes?” His eyes widened.

  “It was no Nissan Micra. It was starting to get dark and hard to see, but I’m sure it wasn’t a Micra.”

  “So what kind of car was it?”

  “I don’t know.” Bergmann frowned. “It was too dark to tell. Maybe a Focus or Astra, you know, medium class. Not a station wagon, I don’t think.”

  The investigator opened his mouth, but evidently changed his mind and remained silent.

  “Did Furuberget ever talk about any letters Rask had received—a letter he was searching for in Rask’s room?”

  The second-in-command shook his head. He had fallen to his knees in the entry.

  42

  Bergmann did not manage to break away until an hour later.

  The afternoon traffic was heavy, and he crawled along in an inferno of white snow and red taillights. He could barely see the landscape around him, but what little he could seemed familiar—a little valley, a patch of forest. He caught sight of the sign for the old hospital, Frensby, and worked his way into the exit lane.

  Was it here? he thought, turning on the brights as he curved onto a winding country road lined with bare black trees. The highway lights disappeared quickly in the rearview mirror. He somehow knew that Frensby Hospital was up ahead. So was that where his mother had worked when they first moved to Tveita? Yes, he remembered that now as he got closer.

  After a few minutes of driving on a country road with no streetlights, he came to the closed hospital. It stood like a Gothic monument over a time he hardly recalled. The dark windows gaped at him as he walked across the plaza toward the main entrance. He set his feet carefully on the slippery granite steps and peered in the window. A wash light that was on at the far end of the corridor cast an intense glow over the green floor and row of doors on either side.

  He put his hand on the door handle. It was freezing cold. He knew he should have released it, but he couldn’t resist. Fortunately the door was locked.

  He exhaled. If the door had been open, he would have gone in. A secret hung over this old hospital. A secret he didn’t know if he wanted to find out. His mother had worked here once upon a time, he was sure of it.

  Was this where he’d seen Elisabeth Thorstensen before?

  No, no. He shook his head. It was only his imagination.

  He had just gotten back on the highway when his phone rang. He assumed that it was either Svein Finneland or Fredrik Reuter, and decided to let it ring.

  It rang again as he approached Gardermoen. He picked it up and studied the number. Damn, he thought, it’s Elisabeth Thorstensen.

  “Are you going to find him?” she said without preamble.

  Bergmann got into the right-hand lane, feeling how tired he was after his sleepless night. He planned to stop at the Shell station at Kløfta and buy himself some coffee, have a smoke, and get a little fresh air.

  “Yes,” said Bergmann.

  “I have a terrible feeling,” she said. Her voice sounded distorted for a moment, as though a child was living deep inside her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That he’s coming here.”

  Elisabeth did not elaborate.

  “Do you want police protection, is that what you’re trying to say?”

  She did not reply.

  “Has he ever contacted you?”

  “No.”

  “Then he’s not coming.”

  “I don’t want a guard. No, I don’t want that,” she said, more to herself than to Bergmann.

  “Was there anything else you wanted to tell me?” he said after a long pause. He was almost at the exit to Kløfta. He was about to tell her that he was sorry he’d pushed her too hard yesterday, and that he was glad she’d called, but he didn’t.

  “That part about my relationship with Morten is—” She stopped. “Well, I don’t quite understand why you’re so preoccupied by that.”

  You seem fairly preoccupied by it yourself, thought Bergmann.

  He turned off toward the Shell station.

  “I’m just trying to close up any holes I can find in the investigation. You’re welcome to call me nitpicky.”

  Elisabeth took a deep breath.

  “Oh well,” she said as she exhaled.

  Bergmann parked the car and got out.

  He walked through the slush to the back side of the station and lit a cigarette. He’d once sat back here with Hege, after a trip to Rena, where they’d spent the weekend with friends who had a cabin there. It was one of the nicest trips they’d had together. It was summer; he was happy—as happy as he could be; and she was happy, too, for once. Said that she wanted to have a child with him. Didn’t she? Yes. He stared up at the gray clouds blowing across the black sky. He moved his gaze to the cab of a parked truck. A small Christmas tree shone in the front window. On Christmas Eve I’ll be alone. Then he stopped, refusing to let himself wallow in self-pity.

  “I’ll call you if anything happens,” he said to her.

  “Alex is his son.”

  He took a deep drag on the cigarette.

  “His son?”

  “Per-Erik isn’t Alex’s father. Morten is his father. Morten Høgda.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  He waited.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It has nothing to do with Kristiane. It’s just that I’ve repressed her since 1988. And so much else too. I can’t go on like that. I can’t live a life full of denial. Do you understand what I mean, Tommy?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Do you understand?” she said again.

  “Yes. I understand,” he said quietly, the words drowned out by the roar of the highway nearby.

  “Only you and one girlfriend of mine know this. I want it to stay between us for the time being. Not a word to Per-Erik.”

  “No. I can’t get hold of him anyway. The school told me he’s in Thailand.”

  “No surprise,” she said, not without a certain coldness in her voice. “Thai women make no demands.”

  He ignored her. There were more important things to worry about.

  “So no one else knows that Høgda is Alex’s father?”

  She paused.

  “No.”

  “Not even Morten Høgda?”

  She did not reply.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” said Bergmann. I don’t like people lying to me, he thought, but didn’t want to provoke her.

  “And Alex?”

  “No, God forbid.”

  “I think I’d like to talk to Høgda myself.”

  “Oh well.” The answer came quickly.

  “Are you friends?”

  “We talk sometimes. Not often. He probably doesn’t understand why, but I have to take things one day at a time. Besides, I can’t understand that he would have anything to do with this.”

  “He’s Alex’s father,” said Bergmann. “And he was with you the night Kristiane disappeared. Maybe the night she was murdered.”

  She was silent.

  “Tell me a little more about him.”

  “He was a friend of Per-Erik’s. They were business partners. They shared everything, actually. Before Morten took over the whole firm.”

  She stopped there.

  They shared everything, thought Bergmann. Including you.

  “Another thing,” he said, “about Alexander, Alex . . . I’ll ask you flat-out: Could he have lied during the questioning? He claims he was alone that whole afternoon and evening, until about ten, when he left for a party. But no one can recall seeing him at the party until around midnight.”

  “I don’t recall,” said Elisabeth. “Why would he lie about that?”

  Either you don’t understand, or you don’t want to understand, thought Bergmann.

  “But Alex and Kristiane were both left alone almost a
ll day that Saturday when she disappeared?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Could he have picked her up somewhere, or perhaps driven her someplace? After handball practice?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Alex maintains that he was alone until ten o’clock on the Saturday Kristiane disappeared,” Bergmann repeated, “when he left to meet friends at a private party. But no one there remembers him arriving before midnight, if we can rely at all on witness statements from half-drunk high school kids. Did he usually drive her places? What was the relationship like between them?”

  “I don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

  “Do you think he could be holding something back, that he knows something, but didn’t want to speak up, out of fear of getting dragged into it?”

  She waited a long time.

  Too long.

  “No. No, I could never imagine such a thing.”

  “Does he still live in Tromsø?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I—” she started to say.

  “Yes?”

  “I have to go.”

  When he got back in the car, he picked up the envelope with the letter to Rask. He felt like his head was in a vise. He needed more time, a lot more time.

  Alex was not the son of Per-Erik Thorstensen.

  And who the hell wrote this letter to Rask?

  A woman.

  43

  The last person she wanted to talk to just then was Halgeir Sørvaag. Susanne Bech had spent most of her time after lunch falling into what she knew was a transient depression, one of the countless mood swings Nicolay said he couldn’t live with.

  So why didn’t he leave me? she wondered. Why was I the one who had to leave him? She’d been trying to read through documents systematically since eight o’clock that morning, with only one thought in mind: Kristiane had fallen in love with someone she shouldn’t have. Before lunch she’d even gone over to Aftenposten and sat in the text archive to find something about Bjørn-Åge Flaten’s attempts to sell his story. But now she felt just black inside, and that damned Halgeir “I’m undressing you with my eyes” Sørvaag was standing in the doorway, shifting from one foot to the other.

  She turned her chair around slowly and hoped that Sørvaag couldn’t see that she’d been crying. Ten minutes ago she’d been on the verge of calling Nicolay to ask him to drop the girl she knew he was consoling himself with and come home for Christmas. Instead she had raced into the restroom and cried as quietly as she could. She had washed off her mascara after she had no more tears left, and it looked like Sørvaag didn’t recognize her at first.

  “Yes?” she said, putting her reading glasses on, in the hope that it would make her look like a serious thirty-two-year-old and not a sulky teenage girl who regretted her choices. Anders Rask had escaped, two nurses had been killed, and the head doctor at Ringvoll and his wife had been stabbed to death, and here she was, hiding in the restroom and crying about how she’d left Nico and was going to be alone with Mathea on Christmas Eve.

  “Have you seen Tommy?” Sørvaag asked, perhaps more acidly than he’d intended.

  No, I haven’t seen that nutcase, she thought, but managed to keep her mouth shut and just shook her head.

  Sørvaag grunted a kind of “Oh well” and gave her a strange look.

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  He shrugged, which pulled his shirttail out of his pants. He didn’t even bother to tuck his shirt back in again, but just fiddled a little with his knit jacket, as though he were an insecure schoolboy and not a man who was rapidly approaching the state’s required retirement age.

  “It was just that thing about . . . perhaps you remember . . .”

  Remember what? thought Susanne. That he’d put his hand on her ass when they danced together at the summer party? That she’d ended up with Svein Finneland? Damned men, she was so fucking tired of the whole lot of them.

  “That thing with Maria. Edle Maria. The who—” Sørvaag stopped himself, and Susanne felt her eyes narrowing. She was about to get up and slap him. If he called that poor Lithuanian girl a whore one more time, he would have only himself to blame, and she could find a place in line at the employment office.

  “What about her?”

  “The girl said only one understandable thing, and that was Maria. Do you remember that I said I’d heard that name somewhere? The word the girl said first, Edle, and then Maria?”

  I remember that Fredrik Reuter made you look foolish, thought Susanne.

  “Yes.”

  “Old Lorentzen, my first boss, once told me about a case from many years ago. Something about Maria, from a place he’d worked. Edle Maria. Somewhere up north.”

  “And you still think there’s a connection?” Susanne took her glasses off, and any thought of Christmas Eve alone with Mathea, or Nicolay between the legs of a twenty-something blonde, disappeared. Sørvaag was no favorite of hers, but he’d never been stupid.

  “Where was it Lorentzen worked?” she asked.

  “It may be a coincidence.”

  “It’s worth checking out.”

  “The problem is that his personnel folder has been destroyed. He’s dead, and his wife is dead.”

  “Yes, but we can get hold of someone who worked with him, his kids. There must be someone who can tell us where he worked.”

  Sørvaag nodded.

  “He only told me about it once, one night we were working together. The first time I saw a murdered person. He told me that there was a young girl up north, where he worked, who’d been found after several months. Killed with a knife, slaughtered according to the autopsy, and devoured by animals. Her name was Edle Maria. I’m quite certain of it now.”

  His phone rang. He stood there, looking at it like an idiot.

  “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” he said again, then disappeared down the corridor.

  It’s no damned coincidence, thought Susanne, looking up the number for Kripo.

  “Do we have a list of persons killed in the sixties? In northern Norway?”

  The man on the other end laughed cynically. “No, that system hasn’t been invented yet. The file is probably still located where it was investigated, or more likely in the National Archives up there. If the record still exists at all, that is. Listen, I have another call.”

  She was put on hold.

  It was almost four thirty.

  She cursed as she sat there looking at her own reflection in the window.

  She could picture Mathea, lying upside down on the slide on the daycare playground, the dark-clothed person standing motionless on the walkway observing the little girl. She hung up. Her child was far more important than waiting for men who laughed at her.

  She had just gotten her bubble coat down from the coat stand when her phone rang.

  “You have to go out to Malmøya,” said Bergmann without so much as a hello.

  “Hello to you too. Bad day?”

  “The worst. I passed the car of the person who killed Furuberget. But do you think I remember what kind of car it was? Hell no. I can only remember what kind of car it wasn’t.”

  “Cryptic,” said Susanne. She was already on her way down the stairs; she didn’t have time to wait for the elevator. With any luck, she would make it to daycare before it closed. Mathea would undoubtedly use it against her one day that she almost always got picked up last.

  “Regardless. Furuberget was searching for a letter that someone had written to Rask. There’s got to be a connection there, don’t you think?”

  Susanne shook her head.

  “Tommy . . .”

  “I think Furuberget was killed by someone he’d met before. He was about to serve coffee when he was killed, do you understand? Perhaps by the person who wrote the letter. But I think it’s a woman. That confuses me.”

  “I don’t understand a thing,” said Susanne.

  She jogged across Grønlandsleiret, looking out for
a taxi in the absurd chaos of Christmas wreaths, tandoori restaurants, round-cheeked elves, and women in hijab. Bergmann filled her in on the letter Furuberget had been searching for, the letter he was convinced was written by a woman. Medusa’s tears.

  “Jon-Olav Farberg is the only one we have who knows Rask. I think he’s holding something back. Read the report, go out to see him, and decide for yourself.”

  Susanne had already read the report from the first interview with Farberg. She knew what Bergmann was getting at. Who was Rask’s friend, Yngvar? If Farberg said A, he would have to say B.

  “I think it’s a woman who wrote to Rask. And I think he’s on his way to meet her. Question Farberg. I have to go talk to someone else tonight. It’s urgent.”

  “Okay, I’ll get a babysitter,” she said.

  He sighed on the other end, as if he’d forgotten that she had a child. As if he thought, Oh good heavens, that kid, always the damned kid.

  There’s no way in the world he’ll ever recommend me for a permanent position. If she didn’t pull this off, it was all over.

  “It might have to be this evening.”

  “It has to be this evening. Check him out, understand? You’re good at this. Read the report I wrote after the interview with him out at Lysaker. His number’s in there. Ask him about Rask. Use that as a point of entry. He knows Rask. Rask has escaped. Got it?”

  “But why do you find him so interesting?”

  “He’s the only person who knows Rask, and I think he’s lying about something. Shouldn’t that be reason enough?”

  She got hold of Torvald on the first try. He still had a meeting at work before he could leave, and said he couldn’t pick up Mathea on such short notice. But of course he could watch her this evening. Again. If Mathea had been two years younger, she probably would have thought that the gay man from the floor below was her father.

  Susanne felt a tingling down her spine. She just had to print out that damned report. Mathea would be standing by the entry with a grumpy daycare teacher by her side when she arrived.

  She stopped on the sidewalk and keyed to Bergmann on the contact list on her phone.

  “Why—” she began, but just got a busy signal. Why can’t you go out there?