by Gard Sveen
He banged on the window.
“Open up, Farberg!”
He pounded the window so hard that it almost broke. The bundle inside the living room showed no signs of moving.
“Give me the machine gun,” he said as a car door slammed on the other side of the house. He struck the butt into the glass of the porch door, three times in a row. The air filled with the sound of splintering glass. He stuck his hand in through the opening and turned the lock, then the doorknob.
A red light went on in the living room. One of the security system sensors had been triggered. Somewhere in the city a silent alarm was notifying a security company.
Bergmann gave the revolver to the officer and moved carefully across the shards of glass. He turned the machine-gun light on. The red-dot sight and the sharp light swept across the walls. The sound of crushed glass and the front door opening at the other end of the house confused him for a moment. He pointed the light at the sofa arrangement in the middle of the room, then up the wall to his left, illuminating a picture he’d seen before. Gustaf Fröding, he thought. Susanne had said she’d seen that picture right here.
The ceiling light in the room was turned on, blinding him. Then his gaze fell on the woman who lay on the sofa—or what was left of her. She lay on the beige leather couch, which was soaked with blood from countless stab wounds. Her face was almost gone. Bergmann didn’t know who she was; he could only assume that it was Jon-Olav Farberg’s wife or partner.
“Oh shit,” he heard the officer say behind him. It sounded like he was going to break down at any moment.
“I don’t understand,” Bergmann said to himself, lowering the MP5 toward the floor.
His phone rang in the pocket of his bubble jacket. He tore it off and loosened the Velcro on the Kevlar vest. He felt as if he couldn’t catch a breath. “Frank Krokhol” it said on the display.
He studied the dead woman’s body. The commander stomped around while he called for an ambulance on the portable radio, even though it was too late.
Bergmann went out on the patio.
Krokhol called again, though Bergmann had no idea why.
“Yes?” He looked in through the living room windows.
“Has something happened?” said Krokhol. He could smell news simply from the tone of Bergmann’s voice, which he was unable to control.
“What is it?”
“That obituary. They found it right away up there.”
“And?”
“‘Our dear Edle Maria,’” Krokhol read. “‘Edle Maria Reiersen. Born on May 3, 1946. Died October 1, 1962.’ Then Gunnar and Ester. And one more name.”
Bergmann felt as if all the blood drained from his body. For a moment he was unable to make out the name Krokhol said into his ear.
He was not even able to answer when Krokhol asked, twice in a row, “What is this supposed to mean, Tommy?”
60
An inexplicable calm almost always came over her when they brushed their teeth. It was so late that they really should have skipped it.
But just then, it felt delightfully ordinary, a necessary little ritual for her peace of mind. Torvald had gone down to his place to get a bottle of red wine since she didn’t have any left. And she simply could not let herself get so damned hysterical. The doors were locked, both to the courtyard and out to the street.
A little wine, Susanne thought. A little wine is all I need.
God help her, she’d drunk so much this autumn. She would have to change her ways after Christmas.
Just so long as she’d remembered to lock the door behind her.
Of course. Of course she had.
The music from the living room was barely audible. The door to the bathroom was half-open.
“Nice Mommy,” said Mathea. “Nice, pretty Mommy.”
Susanne shook her head a little at her child, surprised by these out-of-the-blue compliments. She put water on the toothbrush and straightened up. She felt that she’d been crouched down too long, and her head was getting too little oxygen. She felt lightheaded for a moment, as though she was going to faint. All went black before her eyes for a few seconds.
When she recovered, the sound of running water sounded unnaturally loud, like a waterfall. Her gaze moved along the surface of the mirror.
A face. White. At the very edge of the mirror.
In the doorway.
Susanne breathed deeply through her nose. The sound of the water drowned out every thought. She closed her eyes for a moment.
The face was gone.
Susanne opened her eyes and focused all her attention on turning off the faucet. The apartment was completely quiet.
“Mommy?”
Susanne stared down at the tiles on the floor.
“Why are you breathing so funny?” Mathea tried to take the toothbrush out of her hand, but she wouldn’t let it go. She was unable to let it go. She looked up again in the mirror.
The face was gone.
But it had been there.
White face. Dark hair. A woman.
“Be quiet,” she said. “Torvald?” she called.
“Mommy, what is it?”
“Nothing.” She smiled, and could tell from Mathea’s expression that her attempt to calm her was successful. “Let’s play a game,” Susanne whispered. “Can you count to a hundred twice in a row?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll go out and lock the door to the bathroom. You sit down on the floor and count. If you can do that, you’ll get a prize. Then I’ll unlock the door, and tomorrow we’ll go to the toy store in Oslo City and buy anything you like. How does that sound?”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“That’s a funny game. But okay.”
She opened the medicine cabinet and found the key that she kept hidden there, so that Mathea wouldn’t lock herself in the bathroom.
Mechanically, as if she’d done it a thousand times, she found the metal nail file.
Had she been seeing things?
No.
She heard a sound coming from the apartment. From the kitchen. A glass being knocked over.
“I’m sure it’s just Torvald,” Susanne whispered. “Start counting now.” She kissed Mathea on the cheek.
Bergmann’s pistol was hidden in the inside pocket of her jacket in the hall. Another sound, another glass, from the kitchen. She had a chance.
Miraculously Mathea had sat down on the floor. She was already up to twenty.
Susanne took a deep breath. She was trembling as she exhaled.
She opened the door with the nail file in one hand and the key in the other and looked out into the living room. She closed the door behind her and tried to regain control of her hand. It seemed as if the key didn’t fit. She turned and turned, glancing around as she did so.
Finally.
She put the key in her pants pocket.
Torvald, she thought. Has something happened to Torvald?
She backed down the hall toward the entry, turned and looked into the living room. No one there. No Torvald. The woman with the white face must have caught him on his way downstairs. She bumped into the wall in the entry. Her front door was halfway open, and she saw Torvald’s shoes on the landing. A movement. She heard a gurgling sound and peered out the doorway, saw that it was coming from his mouth. Blood was pouring out of him, but he was alive. He whispered something, but she couldn’t understand what it was.
“You must be Susanne.”
At the kitchen door stood the woman with the white face. She held a knife in her hand, a kitchen knife, which hung limply alongside her body.
An icy chill coursed through her, and she suddenly felt colder than she ever had before.
She took a step to the side and fumbled for the little pistol Bergmann had given her, which was still in the inside pocket of her jacket. Her hands were calm as she released the safety.
“Shoot me,” said the woman, coming toward her. She resembled an injured predator in
her big fur coat. She must have once been a very beautiful woman, but her face was now drained of color, of life itself.
“Mommy,” Mathea called from the bathroom.
The woman stopped outside the bathroom.
Just as Susanne raised the pistol in a two-hand grip, she recognized the woman.
This can’t be true, she thought. Please, say it wasn’t you.
“Shoot me while she’s listening. If not I’ll take her. You know that. Edle Maria is bad. Elisabeth has told me that I’m bad. My name means noble, isn’t that strange?”
“Edle Maria is dead,” said Susanne.
“No, Elisabeth made me.”
“No, you’re Elisabeth. Put down the knife, then I’ll help you. You need help.”
Elisabeth Thorstensen must have absorbed the personality of her dead sister, Edle Maria. She was no longer Elisabeth. She was Edle Maria.
“I’m coming soon, Mathea,” said the woman. Mathea fell silent.
“I’ll kill you if you try to take her,” said Susanne. “Do you understand that? I’m going to shoot you.”
“Daddy never touched me. Never. Elisabeth was so much prettier than I was. I hated her for that. That fucking bitch.” Her voice changed to a thin whine. “He was our father. Do you understand?”
“Who killed you? Who killed you, Edle Maria?”
The woman came closer.
“Jon-Olav told me about you. That fool. You asked him about me. He’s Elisabeth’s best friend. She told me that he read for her at the hospital in Sandberg during the summer. She told him everything. That whore told him everything. No one else, just him.”
“Mommy!” Mathea called. She pounded on the door, just inches from the woman.
“Come out,” said the woman. “Come, my girl.”
“Mathea, don’t answer her,” said Susanne. She took a step closer, lowering the weapon.
“Elisabeth asked me for help, but I never helped her. I knew about her and Daddy, do you understand?”
Susanne almost dropped the pistol.
“He abused her? Is that what you mean?”
“Mommy. Mommy.” Mathea’s voice was so desperate that Susanne considered wounding Elisabeth Thorstensen just so that she could get her daughter out of the bathroom.
“Don’t be scared,” Susanne called. “I’ll be there in just a minute.”
She tried to get her phone out of her back pocket, but wasn’t able to.
“Is Jon-Olav a friend of Elisabeth’s?”
“Yes.”
“So he’s Elisabeth’s friend? Is he the one who gets you to do the bad things?”
She nodded.
“He said to Elisabeth that if I do bad things, then maybe Elisabeth will get healthy. He just wanted to help Elisabeth get better. I’m the one who did those things, not Elisabeth. I lured them to me. Jon-Olav said no one would ever suspect a woman.”
“Why did you take Kristiane? You know that she was Elisabeth’s daughter?”
Elisabeth Thorstensen stared at her with a look Susanne knew that she would never forget, as if her real personality was trying to get out, but was unable to.
Susanne’s hands were sweaty on the pistol stock. She didn’t know what she could say to get Elisabeth to set down the knife. And she had to get to Torvald.
“But Jon-Olav is dead now,” Elisabeth said.
“Where is he?”
“In an oven,” she whispered.
Mathea was crying quietly inside the bathroom. Susanne tightened her grip on the little pistol.
“In an oven?”
“He didn’t want to make Elisabeth healthy anymore. So I killed him.”
“Where?”
“An old factory. You’ll figure it out. We went there occasionally.”
Susanne shifted her grip on the pistol with both hands and held it up in front of her.
“You want to know who killed me? Elisabeth killed me,” said the woman, barely audible. “She crushed my face with a stone. He’d moved us north. But he didn’t stop touching her. She had a girlfriend, but she didn’t help her either. Elisabeth told me that it was the mother of your husband, Tommy.” The woman smiled.
“He’s not my husband.”
“He is your husband. And then she crushed my face with a stone. She held me by the jaw and struck my face until it was completely gone.” The woman crumpled to the floor and let go of the knife.
“Stop talking,” said Susanne.
Mathea’s crying grew louder, but Susanne hardly heard it. She went slowly toward the woman, who sat with her head bowed like a child, like Mathea. The knife was within reach. I can do this, she thought.
She heard boots in the stairwell. Several people. A portable radio. A command.
“I’ll help you,” she said. “Elisabeth, I’m going to help you.”
“Elisabeth killed me!” the woman screamed.
At first Susanne didn’t feel anything. It moved so fast that she didn’t understand what had happened. A shudder passed through her leg, then a pain so sharp that she feared her leg might have been severed. She fell to the floor, onto the hand that held the pistol. The woman stood up, looming over her with the knife in her hand.
That’s my blood, thought Susanne. Then she passed out.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman whispered, raising the knife. “But your child is going to be like Elisabeth. Haven’t you realized that? I can’t let her live. Jon-Olav said that. You mustn’t let her live.”
Susanne came to and twisted to the left. All she heard was her own pulse—not Mathea, not the boots on the stairs—only the pounding in her temples and chest and throat. She thought she might have broken her arm when she fell, but she was able to raise it.
After the shot, there was silence. The woman’s right eye disappeared. A geyser of blood struck Susanne in the leg and stomach. She fired again, this time the way Bergmann had told her to, right in the stomach.
The woman dropped the knife and fell. Susanne felt her ribs crack as the woman’s head struck her body.
Then everything was quiet.
There were no boots on the stairs.
No Bergmann.
Mathea started crying again.
Susanne tried to push the dead woman off her, but was unable to. Her left leg burned with pain, and her right arm was unresponsive.
“I’m coming,” she whispered. She tried to call out, but no sound came out. Her clothes were soaked with blood, the woman’s head lay in her arms, and all she could manage was to whisper, “I’m coming, Mathea, I’m coming.”
Torvald, she thought. He’s still lying out there on the landing.
She tried to call out again, but only a thin, wheezing sound came out.
A door opened. A shout in another language, Punjabi, she thought. Several voices.
61
Five days later
One of the girls put the ball in the crossbar. It must have been the reaction from the small crowd that woke Bergmann up.
First rejoicing, then disappointment.
The sound of the ball against the wood and the cheers of the parents in the stands finally reached him, as if reality was being sent with a two-second delay.
He got up from the bench. He was still confused and pretty out of it, but now he was at least following along. He looked up at the scoreboard and remembered seeing Hadja before the match. She was there with her new boyfriend. It had set him back for a moment, but what about it? Could he even call whatever they’d had a proper relationship? It had been almost a year and a half ago. Whatever. He was an idiot.
It didn’t matter. Something else had made him numb and detached.
He called out some words—“faster ball tempo”—then signaled for a play. Seconds later Martine slammed the ball into the goal. He gave the assistant coach a high five and sat back down on the bench, nearly tipping over and landing on his back like a drunk.
He’d arrived on the last flight from Tromsø yesterday and lain awake all night, then gone to a therapy sessi
on with Osvold at eight o’clock. Maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that he hadn’t been able to sleep.
“Maybe I should have been admitted to Ringvoll or Sandberg myself,” he’d said to Osvold. The psychiatrist had not replied, and Bergmann interpreted the silence the way he wanted.
The second meeting with Alexander Thorstensen in Tromsø had not told him much more than he already knew. Bergmann knew that he should have checked whether Elisabeth had been hospitalized at Ringvoll, not Frensby, after Kristiane was killed. And at Sandberg as well, back in the seventies. The healthcare reforms in this country had sent her and her presumed schizophrenia over half of eastern Norway. Alexander said he wasn’t surprised his mother never got the help she needed, the liability disclaimers in the healthcare system being what they were. Besides, it may have been impossible for anyone to correctly diagnose her. There was little doubt that she had developed a split personality. For a long time it was believed that schizophrenia was linked to split personality, but today that was known to be incorrect. Patients with split personalities could in the worst cases be aware of the existence of the various personalities and could be capable of concealing them under the guise of a psychotic condition. Alexander thought his mother was probably a mystery to those treating her.
“But Jon-Olav Farberg must have been able to read her like an open book,” Bergmann had said.
Alexander said that Farberg was probably the first adult his mother had ever trusted—the first person she had ever been able to reveal her true self to. With her upbringing and pattern of illness, she was easily taken advantage of by someone like Farberg.
The personnel records at Sandberg showed that Farberg had worked at Sandberg Psychiatric Hospital as a summer and vacation replacement while he was studying at the teachers college in Hamar. And every time there was a full moon, they had to call in extra staff.
Alexander told Bergmann that he assumed Kristiane had fallen in love with Farberg, and that she went to his apartment in Skøyen to see him. Elisabeth must have somehow found out. It seemed to be an enormous relief to him to learn that his mother was dead; she had killed all those girls, even his own sister. Who could blame him for that?
Martine pounded in yet another goal, a forearm shot from nine meters. Bergmann saw it without seeing it. He clapped, but it was as if his hands weren’t his own.