by Gard Sveen
Bergmann nodded. The original had been sent to Kripo for fingerprints and handwriting analysis, but he had the copy in front of him.
“So you think that the letter to Rask was written by a woman, while the letter to you was written by a man?” Flatanger asked, looking right at him. Bergmann sensed that he knew that he had therapy sessions with Viggo Osvold—and that he had skipped the last two sessions. If Reuter found that out, his career would be over.
It hardly mattered.
“Yes, I think so.”
Flatanger placed the two letters side by side.
“At least I think that they were written by two different people.”
“What makes you so sure?” Flatanger was leaning over the letters. “It looks as though the text could have been written by the same person.”
“But look at the handwriting in the first one. And ‘Medusa.’ The writer’s referring to a woman.”
Flatanger nodded.
“True enough.”
“What are you thinking?” said Finneland, standing up suddenly from his chair and walking around the table until he stood behind Bergmann.
“I think that the letters may have been written by two different people in one mind.”
Bergmann held his hand up.
“What do you mean? Two people in one mind?”
Flatanger drew his hand across his face.
“Or two minds in one person.”
“But how . . .” said Finneland behind Bergmann. He continued around the table toward Flatanger.
“I think the tone is markedly similar in both letters, but the handwriting is clearly quite different. Nonetheless, I think we’re looking for one person, not two.”
“And you think we’re looking for two people, Bergmann?” Finneland had returned to his seat. Bergmann studied his thin face awhile, the obvious veins on his hands.
“I think a woman wrote to Rask, and a man wrote to me.” It was as if another person were speaking for him. To me, he thought. To me.
“This last person knows you, that’s fairly obvious.”
“Or,” said Flatanger, “the person in question thinks or imagines that he knows you.”
“Why are you so sure that it’s a woman, Tommy?” Reuter’s voice was low and hoarse. He kept his fingers on the letter, then let go and tapped his finger on the table.
“Doesn’t that look like a woman’s handwriting to you?”
“Maybe,” said Flatanger. “We’ll figure that out.”
“And this thing with the girl on Frognerveien. Why did she say ‘Maria’? There must be a woman involved in all this.”
“That’s right. Sørvaag?” Finneland turned to him. “Did you get any further? Didn’t you have some lead on that?”
Sørvaag took a breath and shook his head.
“Just as I thought.”
It was quiet for a long time. At last Flatanger broke the silence.
“I’m quite certain that we’re searching for just one person. I think that Arne Furuberget was searching for an old patient.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just think so. He told me that he’d been to Brumunddal. The Ringvoll archives are there.”
“What if it’s a man who thinks he’s a woman?”
“A man who thinks he’s a woman?” Reuter shook his head and looked at Bergmann as if he had completely lost his faith in him.
Bergmann just sat there, holding his coffee cup. He set it carefully aside and held up the surveillance picture. He was not in the slightest doubt about who was in that picture.
“A man who thinks he’s a woman?”
“A man by day. A woman at night,” said Flatanger. “I understand where you’re headed.”
“Like this man?” said Bergmann. He held up the surveillance image from Cort Adelers Gate. He had held back long enough. “This is Morten Høgda,” he said. “He had a relationship with Elisabeth Thorstensen in the past. And I’m quite certain that he still does.”
He kept quiet about the rest of it—that he was Alexander Thorstensen’s father. And that Kristiane had evidently fallen in love with him, her own half-brother.
“Morten Høgda,” said Reuter. “Morten Høgda?”
Høgda would have some explaining to do.
“Inconceivable,” said Finneland. “Is that really Høgda?” He picked up the photograph and held it up to his face.
“We won’t call him in for questioning yet. He mustn’t know a thing about any of this ahead of time, okay?”
“Call him in for questioning?” said Finneland.
“Good Lord, we’ve been looking for this guy for days—our only lead—and he couldn’t be bothered to report in. That’s almost grounds for indictment.”
Bergmann stood up. He didn’t have time for this. He had to get up to Tromsø during daylight hours, and he wanted his arrival to be a surprise for Alexander Thorstensen.
“Høgda’s owned a cabin on Hvasser since the seventies. Do I need to remind you where the first girl was killed?”
“Tønsberg,” said Flatanger. “I’ll check if he’s ever been admitted to Ringvoll.”
“Be careful,” said Reuter. “I don’t want Høgda’s lawyers on my back. Owning a cabin there doesn’t automatically mean that he’s the country’s number-one maniac. Okay?”
“Fine. So I guess we’re through?” said Bergmann.
Reuter opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Bergmann left the room without a word.
He walked quickly to his office, opened the browser, and entered “Morten Høgda” in the search field. Høgda was evidently media shy, but one of the few pictures that came up was good enough that he could print it out.
On his way to the copy room, he asked Linda in reception to book a flight to Tromsø around noon.
When he came back to his office, Halgeir Sørvaag was sitting in his chair.
Bergmann set the picture of Høgda on the desk and put on his bubble jacket. He had no intention of telling Sørvaag where he was going or why he was taking the picture with him. The worst thing would be if Høgda was abroad, got a phone call about coming into Oslo for questioning, and hopped on the first flight to Cambodia.
Sørvaag stared out the window without saying anything.
“Enjoying the view?” said Bergmann. “I’m short on time, so get to the point.”
“I got hold of one of old Lorentz’s kids last night. Damned if I couldn’t stop thinking about the Maria stuff.”
“Maria?”
“Edle Maria. What the girl said at the hospital.”
Bergmann stuffed the picture of Høgda in an envelope.
“I have to go, Halgeir.”
“No one believes me.”
Bergmann stopped in the doorway.
“What do you mean?”
“Maria, Tommy. It’s no coincidence that the girl said that at the hospital. Maybe someone called her and scheduled a time with her. Someone who called themselves Edle Maria. But we can’t find her damned phone.”
The images flickered past Bergmann’s eyes. How she’d sat up and screamed. How scared he’d been.
“It may only be a coincidence,” said Sørvaag.
“Maybe.”
“Nordreisa,” said Sørvaag.
It took a few seconds for Bergmann to understand what he’d said.
Then, in the blink of an eye, he felt the turning of the earth quite clearly. His feet disappeared into heavy marshland, and his head was pressed as though in a vise.
“What did you say?” Bergmann said, so quietly that Sørvaag didn’t hear him.
“Old Lorentz was a deputy sheriff in Nordreisa. That girl, Edle Maria, was killed there. The son confirmed it. I remember him telling me that, but I didn’t remember the place. They never found the killer.”
“Nordreisa?”
Bergmann had to support himself against the door frame.
He unfolded the copy of the letter he’d received in the mail. “Can you remember me?”
He’d always told himself that he didn’t know where his mother came from. But he just didn’t want to know, didn’t want to know anything about her, without ever knowing why.
She was from Nordreisa.
And Morten Høgda was from the neighboring town.
51
Her fingers were frozen to the bone; her skin cracked under her thin mittens. Susanne cursed herself for this fool’s errand. She was standing outside the fourth terraced apartment building in the Nedre Skøyen Vei condominium complex. The sun had climbed over the horizon, blinding her as she approached the doorbells with their nameplates. She had already filled ten pages in her notepad with names and addresses, but it all seemed pointless.
It had been sixteen years since Kristiane had been here. The person she was searching for probably didn’t even live here anymore. Even if she looked up everyone who was registered here, some of them were renters and the name in the register didn’t always match the address. In fact they seldom did.
She quickly jotted down all the names on a blank page; she was up to a hundred and ten names and needed a new pad.
Stop, she thought. The feeling that something had happened to Mathea had been growing with every passing minute.
She took out her phone, nearly blacking out with panic as she entered the wrong PIN code twice in a row. When she finally remembered it, she closed her eyes while the phone searched for a network. She felt certain there were several missed calls from daycare.
No. Four missed calls from Bergmann, that was all. She’d turned off her phone specifically to avoid talking to him since she was certain he would try to talk her out of what she was doing. And who could blame him?
She jumped when the phone rang while she was staring at it. “Tommy Bergmann’s mobile” it said on the display.
The door to the entry opened with a bang. An elderly man looked at her suspiciously. Damned two-front war, she thought. Damned men, young and old. They’re all alike, every one of them.
“And what are you up to?” he said, buttoning the top button on his cardigan. “I’ve been watching you, young lady.”
Thanks for the compliment, thought Susanne.
“I’m from the Census Bureau,” she said, smiling as disarmingly as she could. Her phone stopped ringing. A text message arrived a moment later. She could almost hear from the sound that it was Bergmann. And he was angry.
“Census Bureau? What nonsense.”
She would have to play the role of serious patrol officer. She opened her jacket and held out her police ID, which hung around her neck.
“I’d like to work in peace, if you don’t have anything against that.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “May I ask—”
“No. Unfortunately you can’t ask anything. Have a nice day.”
The man’s expression changed immediately, and he suddenly appeared subservient and afraid of her. He closed the door and disappeared. If she’d told him what she was really up to, he would probably have laughed at her. Search here, sixteen years after Kristiane Thorstensen had apparently been on her way to one of these five terraced apartment buildings—and all this according to a dying junkie? It was folly.
Her phone rang again. Bergmann. She had no choice but to answer it.
“Where have you been?” he said, but not sounding as angry as she’d imagined he might.
“Working on a lead.”
“Would’ve appreciated it if you’d informed me. We have to talk.” He paused. “But I have to go to Tromsø today. I need you to go straight over to the National Library. Find out what the newspapers up north—Nordlys, or whatever they’re called—wrote about the murder of a girl by the name of Edle Maria in Nordreisa. Sometime in the early sixties. It’s urgent.”
“Edle Maria?”
Susanne walked around in circles a few times.
Maria. The name the Lithuanian girl had screamed at the hospital. And Edle. Wasn’t that the name Sørvaag had mentioned?
Susanne had over a hundred names on her pad, sixteen years after Kristiane had been at the apartments. And Edle Maria. Nordreisa. She shook her head, felt like sitting down and crying. How could this possibly all add up?
“Oh well.” Her voice was submissive.
“This may be important. Do you understand? I need you now, Susanne. What are you really up to?”
Susanne waited a moment.
“I was at Lovisenberg in the middle of the night. Bjørn-Åge Flaten is on his deathbed. He saw Kristiane at Skøyen. Saw where she went. I believe him, Tommy.”
He took a deep breath on the other end.
“Okay,” he said simply. “Okay. But I need you at the National Library. Maybe you can just make a few calls about the other stuff?”
Susanne leaned against the concrete wall by the doorbells. She wanted to tell him that if he was already going to Tromsø, he could stop by Nordlys and check their archives himself for Pete’s sake. But she didn’t dare.
She looked down at her notepad filled with names. This was worse than a needle in a haystack.
Sixteen years, she thought. This is hopeless.
52
It was easier to find a parking space than he’d thought it would be. Bergmann didn’t have time to drive around the block endlessly. As he squeezed the old Escort in between a BMW and a Mercedes, he told himself that he was fortunate to be an underpaid policeman.
Self-deception was undervalued as a survival strategy. He smiled for a moment before he was again overcome by gloom.
Edle Maria. Nordreisa. He got shivers at the thought. He tried to recall what his mother had told him about herself, but he’d never really paid attention the few times she’d done so. He’d only remembered a kind of quiet fury in her when she spoke of the past. That it would have been for the best if the little woman who called herself his mother had been dead. That he ought to have killed her himself. He remembered thinking he might be crazy. That this was just the way his father must have been. That was why she’d escaped here, to the south. That was exactly what Osvold had been getting at—it wasn’t Hege he’d beaten up, but his mother. It just felt so damned distasteful to admit that everything Hege did reminded him of his mother, that the blazing rage he’d felt had nothing to do with Hege at all. Paradoxically, he was relieved that she’d managed to get away from him.
Osvold, he thought. Tomorrow he would have to get around to going to see Osvold again. He was just a phone call away from getting fired. Besides, he needed someone to talk to. And could he trust that Susanne would do what he’d asked? The fact that he hadn’t reprimanded her for believing Bjørn-Åge Flaten suggested that he was getting soft in the head.
He walked over to the entryway of the building where the Lithuanian girl had almost been killed. The young couple in the neighboring apartment knew more than they’d told them, he was sure of that. The wife did, in any case. She was home with a six-month-old baby. With a little luck, he would catch her before she went out to push the stroller in Frogner Park with her girlfriends or slipped away to one of the many coffee shops on this side of the city. She was concealing something. And it was best to come when she wasn’t expecting him, like now.
He pushed the doorbell.
“Hello?” crackled the loudspeaker.
“Tommy Bergmann, police.”
She didn’t answer at once.
“It’s not a good time.”
“Then I’ll have to ask you to come down to the police station later today.”
She sighed in resignation.
He looked at his watch. He’d miss his flight if she was going to be difficult.
“Okay, then.”
He pushed open the entry door. Just as the killer had done.
You? wondered Bergmann, taking the surveillance-camera picture of Morten Høgda out of his pocket.
She was waiting for him with the kid on her arm when he arrived on the fourth floor. He hardly recognized her without makeup.
“I just have a few quick questions for
you.”
Her face was serious, the child’s eyes wide. She smiled, then started to cry.
Who can blame you? thought Bergmann, taking a look at himself in the mirror in the entry.
The woman set the child down under a baby gym in the living room, and she stopped crying. The light streamed in through the windows, making the room look even whiter than it already was.
“Would you like something to drink?” she said, avoiding his gaze.
Bergmann shook his head.
“Is your husband at work?”
She nodded and scratched her forearm with her artificial nails. He took out the enhanced picture of Morten Høgda from the surveillance camera. Then he took out the print of the picture he’d found on the Internet.
“Have you seen this man before? In the entry?”
Therese Syvertsen pushed her blonde hair behind her ears and studied the pictures for a long time. Much too long. She closed her eyes and took a few steps away from him.
“Have you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“The night the girl was attacked?”
She shook her head.
“He’s been here a few times. I’ve seen him through the peephole in the door. I ran into him down in the entryway lobby. He looked at me as though he thought I was like her. As if I could be bought.”
“But you didn’t see him through the peephole that night?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was asleep. I didn’t see anyone.”
“What about your husband?”
“Nothing wakes him. Not her, at least.” Therese nodded toward the child who lay babbling to herself on the floor. She reached for the toys that dangled from the baby gym.
“Do you know who he is? Have you seen him anywhere else?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll need you to come down to the police station tomorrow. Nine o’clock, can you manage that? Feel free to bring the child with you. You’ll have to sign some papers.”
Therese stared vacantly at him, as if there was something more she was withholding.
“Has your husband asked you to keep your mouth shut?” he said. It seemed as if that struck a chord in her, as she straightened up immediately and her expression changed.