by Gard Sveen
Bergmann had spent the rest of the day questioning Morten Høgda.
Høgda had finally broken down in the interview room. He said that Elisabeth had once told him that her father had started abusing her sexually when she was eight or nine years old, but that he mustn’t tell anyone. She told him that her father had never touched her sister, that she felt so dirty, that all girls were dirty little whores like her. They didn’t deserve to live, as she herself didn’t deserve to live.
“And you made her even dirtier yourself,” Bergmann said, “instead of trying to help her.”
Høgda said that he’d occasionally been afraid of Elisabeth, that she had something frightening and indefinable behind her eyes, that she had another face he never clearly saw. She got furious when he tried to bring it up once and suggest that perhaps she should be hospitalized again and tell the doctor everything. Høgda thought he’d been fooled—he wasn’t the one who had exploited Elisabeth all those years, but the other way around. She had tried to lure him into a trap. He wasn’t the one who’d arrived late to their meeting at the Radisson hotel the night the Lithuanian girl was killed.
“Two days later she called me and asked why I arrived so late,” Høgda said. “I told her she was the one who was late—over two and a half hours late. Then she just started crying, like a child. She’d always been a little wacky, but this . . .”
Bergmann just shook his head. Then he got Høgda to write a four-page letter by hand, just to rule out the possibility that he had written one of the letters. When he came back into the interview room, he took one look at it and confirmed what he already knew, then just wadded up the pages and threw them in the wastebasket.
Elisabeth Thorstensen was dead. Jon-Olav Farberg was dead. And Anders Rask was still in a coma in Trondheim. But they still hadn’t found Farberg’s body. An old factory, Elisabeth Thorstensen had said. Where should they start?
The match was finally over. Bergmann barely registered that it ended in a tie.
He left the assistant coach in charge and tried to leave the gym as quickly as he could. Unfortunately he was held up by some of the parents who wanted to thank him for the season and wish him a merry Christmas.
Hadja and her boyfriend managed to catch up with him.
“It’s been a long time,” she said. “I’d like you to meet Thomas.”
Bergmann extended a hand. He was young, good-looking, and slender, with clothes that fit him well. Not like Bergmann, a mastodon in rough-hewn granite, in an extra-large blue workout suit that was still too small.
He felt nothing, and that was probably good. She hadn’t meant anything to him, had she?
She gave him a hug when they came out of the gym. Her hair fluttered in the snowstorm, just as it had that summer.
“I hope you’re doing well,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
Thomas put his arm around her as they turned up the steps to the shopping center. Bergmann remained standing in the blizzard with an unlit cigarette in his hand. He stared at the many buses parked by the subway station, the throngs of people on the platform.
Christmas, was it Christmas?
If only Susanne could have shot Elisabeth in the leg. But what kind of wish was that?
He threw away the unlit cigarette and headed into the parking garage. The image of Hadja with that young guy was burned into his mind’s eye. I hope you’re doing well. What did she mean by that?
The sound of his phone ringing in his pocket rescued him from falling into what he knew would be a deepening depression that would last all through Christmas.
“Tommy?” It was Leif Monsen from Dispatch.
Bergmann stopped on the stairs of the parking garage. A weak light settled over him. His gaze followed a falling snowflake.
“I’m in Frysja, at the old brickworks.”
Bergmann walked quickly up the last few steps. He knew exactly what Monsen was about to say.
“I think you should take a little trip up here. Two Polish workers found a little suckling pig in one of the kilns about an hour ago.”
“Suckling pig?”
“No matter how hard you try to burn a dead person, it doesn’t work, you hear what I’m saying? The remnants resemble a suckling pig, albeit one with a shrunken human head.”
Fifteen minutes later Bergmann parked his old Escort outside the gate to the closed factory in Frysja. A young uniformed officer held up the barricade tape for him, just as he himself had done for experienced detectives back in the day. A solitary work lamp hung over the old entryway. The sign labeled “Høgda Property Development” was barely visible.
Apart from the young officer at the barricade, only Monsen and the CSI Georg Abrahamsen, who lived right up the road, were in the big factory hall. The doors to the kiln were wide open. Bergmann nodded at the two Poles and Monsen. He went over to the kiln, where Abrahamsen was busy rigging up a lamp.
“Hold this,” he said, giving Bergmann a metal rod he guessed was part of a stand. A cold wind blew through the cavernous room from one of the broken windows up under the roof. Elisabeth Thorstensen must have known about this place, he thought. Maybe Høgda told her about this project.
But how could she possibly have arranged everything? She couldn’t have had enough time. First kill Farberg’s wife, then Farberg himself, then kidnap the girl in Sofiemyr, assuming that’s what happened, and finally show up at Susanne’s apartment?
Completely impossible.
Abrahamsen stuck his head into the kiln.
“You have to get the body out,” said Bergmann.
Abrahamsen remained silent.
Bergmann studied the kiln and imagined how Elisabeth had gotten him in there on her own. She could easily have rolled Farberg in through the open doors. The mechanism by the doors seemed quite simple. A power switch, a thermostat. Like a kitchen oven.
Abrahamsen had found a spade that resembled the kind used at Italian pizzerias.
When the shriveled figure finally lay in front of them, it seemed inconceivable that it had once been a human being.
“It’s going to take some time to get that identified,” said Abrahamsen, crouching down. Bergmann thought the little body was more reminiscent of an incinerated extraterrestrial than a suckling pig, but the sight was still unpleasant.
“Not a good smell on this Farberg fellow,” said Abrahamsen, taking a pinch of snuff. “But I think his teeth are knocked out.” He pointed the flashlight at what had once been the person’s face.
“So it could be anyone at all,” said Bergmann. “But you don’t knock out someone’s teeth unless you want to make the identification process as difficult as possible.”
“It’s not impossible, but it’s going to take a hell of a long time.”
“Why would Elisabeth Thorstensen knock out Farberg’s teeth?”
“To buy herself time.”
“But why would she need time? She told Susanne herself that she’d killed him.”
“Could it be the girl from Kolbotn?” said Abrahamsen, apparently more to himself than to anyone else.
“The girl?” Bergmann heard somewhere behind him. The door of the building slammed shut, and a draft made Bergmann raise the hood of his bubble jacket over his head. He lit a cigarette without asking for Abrahamsen’s permission.
“So this is Jon-Olav Farberg?” Fredrik Reuter looked like he’d intended to kick the burned carcass with one shoe.
“She knocked his teeth out,” said Bergmann.
“That’s Farberg. I’m certain enough to write his death certificate myself, Tommy.”
“Just as long as it’s not the thirteen-year-old from Sofiemyr,” said Bergmann. “Amanda.”
Reuter’s facial color was about to change from white to red.
“Don’t ruin Christmas for me, okay?”
“Has it occurred to you that Anders Rask let himself be exploited, Fredrik? And that he wasn’t the only one?”
“Never let facts ruin a good story. By the way, merry Christmas, T
ommy.”
Bergmann knew that nothing he said would get through to Reuter just then. Reuter wanted to celebrate Christmas in peace, and perhaps he’d like that too, when he thought about it.
After spending an hour in the old factory, there was nothing more Bergmann could do there. Abrahamsen and his colleagues could manage alone. Reuter had refused to talk to him about anything other than Christmas.
Nonetheless, he could not let the thought go. Who had Georg Abrahamsen scooped out of the kiln?
No, thought Bergmann as he parked the car in a rare vacant space outside his apartment building. I don’t believe it.
He checked his mailbox. It was empty.
“Fortunately,” he said quietly.
Inside his apartment he found a knife in the kitchen and went from room to room. At last he kicked open the door to the bathroom. Just as damned empty as it had been since Hege left. At least as damned empty as it had been since he got the new safety lock mounted.
You’re being misled, just like Anders Rask and Elisabeth Thorstensen.
He sat down at the computer to read about the thirteen-year-old girl in Kolbotn. “Amanda (13) Missing” read the headline. A school portrait filled the screen. He pictured Amanda walking through the forest. She was barely over five feet tall and slightly underweight. What resistance could she have put up, paralyzed by fear? Maybe she never even realized what happened. Half a minute, that was all it would take. That was all she’d needed.
She?
Elisabeth? Bergmann tried to draw a kind of timeline on a piece of paper, but gave up almost before he’d started.
Elisabeth alone?
Inconceivable. Why didn’t Reuter realize that?
Bergmann stared at the face of the young girl on the screen for several minutes. She had a heart-shaped face, teardrop-shaped eyes, and almost perfect teeth. Elisabeth must have been spying on her for a long time. She was going to be pretty as an adult. She was already pretty. In a way that had provoked Elisabeth. Because men would soon start desiring her—perhaps they already did.
Bergmann didn’t know why, but he suddenly felt sure that Amanda was still alive.
The drive down to headquarters took ten minutes. He grabbed the keys to Farberg’s house in Malmøya and tried to think as little as possible.
62
He drove in a trancelike state. Gradually, it all began to make sense. As he drove over the bridge between Ormøya and Malmøya, everything seemed settled.
He sat in the car with the reading light on for a long time. He tried once again to draw a timeline in his notepad. They should have done this a long time ago, but this case had been cursed by a series of false conclusions, and they didn’t seem to have exhausted them yet.
Had they killed all those girls together? What had Elisabeth said to Susanne—he didn’t want to anymore?
He turned off the reading light and lit a cigarette.
Where was Amanda?
Asgeir Nordli had an empty cabin in Nesodden. Jon-Olav Farberg had two cabins, one in Geilo and one in Hvaler. Both equally empty.
The girl must have a boyfriend, thought Bergmann, tossing his cigarette out the car window. One that she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about.
It was no worse than that.
He sat for a long time outside the house and studied the windows one by one. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to be alone in there. It was completely irrational, but nonetheless, he couldn’t let the thought go. Should he ask for firearms? He was in trouble enough as it was, but he didn’t regret giving Susanne the gun. It had saved her life. So it was worth it, even if it cost him his job.
He walked around to the back of the house, just as he’d done the week before. When he put his face up to the living room window, he was afraid for a moment that Farberg’s wife would still be lying there.
He walked back around to the front, removed the barricade tape from the front door, and broke the seal on the lock plate with the key.
In the entryway, he put on a pair of blue shoe protectors and pulled a hairnet from a box by the door. He’d only taken a few steps into the hall when one of the wallboards creaked.
“Damn,” he said to himself. He swept the MagLite through room after room—the kitchen, the library, across the picture of the crazy poet Fröding, the office, and the living room.
He went back to the office and sat down in the chair behind the desk. The flashlight’s beam cut through the darkness, making it almost impossible to see the outer edges of the room. He flashed the light beam over a photograph of Farberg’s son that rested on the table. He was maybe twelve or thirteen years old in the picture. How old was he now? Bergmann thought he’d give him a call tomorrow. He’d spoken with Farberg’s ex-wife several times already. She hadn’t been home that Saturday when Kristiane was in Skøyen. They’d quarreled earlier in the day, and she’d taken her three-year-old son with her and gone to her mother’s in Holmestrand.
This is hopeless, he thought, turning on the green library lamp. He didn’t even know what he was looking for.
Unless. Of course he knew.
He turned off the lamp and walked carefully upstairs to the second floor, without turning on the light. The steps creaked under his weight, and he stopped midstep and turned around. Silence. He had locked the front door behind him, hadn’t he?
In the bathroom on the second floor he turned on the fluorescent light. It blinked a few times. He observed himself in the mirror and remembered how Susanne had seen Elisabeth’s face in the mirror.
He opened the medicine cabinet. A comb and a hairbrush with what looked like Farberg’s hair. He put both in a Ziploc bag. Then he emptied the dirty clothes out of the laundry basket onto the floor, picked up two of Farberg’s underpants, and put them in another bag. Tomorrow he would get Abrahamsen to send all that up to Kripo for analysis, even if he had to do it behind Reuter’s back.
He had just pulled out of Farberg’s driveway when his phone pinged. He pulled over and adjusted the rearview mirror. For some reason he wanted to have the darkened house in view while he talked. He had a feeling that a light might suddenly go on in one of the windows.
Susanne? he thought. It was ten thirty at night.
Are you sleeping? the message said.
No, he answered.
She called half a minute later.
“Everything okay with you?”
“I don’t like being here. But I didn’t like the hospital either.”
“I understand that. Just let me know if you need anything.”
She didn’t reply.
“How’s Torvald doing?”
“He’ll survive. He’ll have to learn to walk again, but he’ll make it. Will you go out there after Christmas to visit him with me?”
Bergmann waited before answering. Not because of the question in itself, but because of the tone in her voice. It sounded as if she really wanted him to go with her. Like she wanted them to be together.
Fool, he thought.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Of course.”
“What are you doing the day after tomorrow?”
“The day after tomorrow?”
She laughed. Not the usual attention-seeking laughter. Something more gentle, tentative. A laugh he could live with.
“Christmas Eve, hello?”
She knew perfectly well he didn’t have a family.
“I’m going to . . .” He tried to pull a lie out of his sleeve, put on a poker face. But he’d never been a poker player. “Nothing.”
“You can’t sit at home alone. You don’t have my permission to sit at home alone, Tommy.”
He didn’t reply.
“Mathea likes pink. Anything pink.”
63
It turned out to be a better Christmas Eve than he could remember having had in years, at least since he was a kid himself. Susanne was funny, and she could cook. Bergmann had a strange feeling that he was wanted there, and not just because he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
&nbs
p; For some reason the girl, Mathea, appeared to have an almost frightening trust in him. Maybe she was that way with everyone—he didn’t know—but for the first time he considered the possibility of having kids. Me? Forget it, he thought a moment later.
Mathea had fallen asleep with her Christmas dress on, and he carried her to her room. He just stood there and watched the sleeping girl for a while. A few minutes in the presence of such pure innocence did him good. This job easily ruined a person. The world wasn’t all bad. Not all.
Susanne was standing in the kitchen with an unopened bottle of wine when he came out. He saw from her expression that it was time to go home.
“Svein’s coming over in a little while. We’ll have to have that second bottle another time, Tommy.” She tried to smile.
He shook his head. “Svein?” he said. Then he understood. “Finneland?”
She nodded and frowned. Her body language indicated that she didn’t want to talk about it. “They’ve argued. I—” She stopped.
“I should be going anyway.”
She laughed. “It was really nice of you to come.”
“It was nice of you to invite me. And I don’t usually say such things.”
She followed him out to the entry, her gait steadier than he’d thought it would be.
“That cast really suits you.”
She laughed again. He hated to admit it, but he liked that laugh. And those eyes.
“To be honest I thought he was married, Susanne.”
She put her arms around him and hugged him for a long time. “How old are you?”
“Forty next year. In two months, actually.”
“Perfect.” She stroked his cheek. “We would have been perfect together, don’t you think?”
He frowned, shrugged.
“But life isn’t perfect, Tommy.”
“Exactly.” And I shouldn’t drink anymore now, he thought.
“Svein Finneland,” he muttered as he fumbled with the key in the building door. He stopped in front of the bulletin board. A new copy of the notice from Property Services was hanging there. Elisabeth had worked there. Why hadn’t he ever followed up on that?