Where Monsters Dwell

by Jorgen Brekke

  “So it would be almost as if it didn’t exist at all?”

  “In a way. But the book could be preserved much longer that way.”

  Singsaker thanked Hornemann for the information and ended the call.

  Immediately after that he received the business card on his phone and called Silvia Freud. It sounded like she used the same cell phone company as Siri Holm: “You have reached the voice mailbox of…” He looked at the digital business card Hornemann had sent him. It also listed a home address. Silvia Freud lived in Solsiden. Conveniently on the way to police headquarters.

  Silvia Freud’s apartment building was across the bridge from the shopping district. When he saw the location of her doorbell, he figured that she must live on the second floor, probably squeezed in between two buildings and without the top floor’s expensive view of the warehouses on Brattøra, with a glimpse of Munkholmen out in the fjord.

  After ringing five times and waiting thirty seconds between them, he realized that she either wasn’t home or wasn’t going to open the door. He ambled back toward the dock and sat down on a bench facing a row of bars and restaurants. Even though the sun had set, it was still warm. The bars were full of people, and the reflections of the lights and street lamps danced on the puddles that covered the old wharf.

  He looked at the photo he had taken that morning. The time stamp on it said 9:53 A.M. Siri Holm must have arrived at Egon’s just after he left. And he had no doubt that she’d gone to meet Silvia Freud and the unknown man. But why?

  There was one more big question, of course: Did this have anything to do with the murder of Gunn Brita Dahle?

  * * *

  From Solsiden he walked the short distance across to the police station and stuck his nose in his office but saw no one he absolutely had to talk to. Then he checked out a cruiser. He was supposed to be at Værnes at eleven.

  When Brattberg called him from Byåsen at ten thirty, he was able to tell her with a certain amount of satisfaction that he’d already passed the electronic checkpoint at Ranheim. She asked him what he’d done with the piece of the knife blade, and he told her it was lying on the desk in his office.

  “Great. I’ll send Grongstad up to get it right away,” she said.

  “Jeez, is he working at this time of day?”

  “You know Grongstad,” she said with a laugh. “Fresh evidence has almost the same effect on him as coca leaves on an Inca messenger.”

  “Or an Energizer battery on a toy rabbit,” he said, laughing too. He instantly realized that this was “fatigue humor,” the kind of jokes people laughed at only when they were overworked or had gone to an after party they should have skipped.

  PART IV

  The Mask of Sanity

  Nature is an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

  —PASCAL, 1670

  27

  The last straw was the final leg of her flight to Trondheim, when Felicia Stone had to sit beside a mother with a baby obviously in need of a diaper change. The turbulence made it difficult to leave one’s seat for almost the entire flight. During the approach she tried to look out the window and see the city of Trondheim, but she saw nothing but dark mountains in the night. Hardly a single light or any other sign of human habitation. She had seen a landscape like this before, during the year she’d lived in Alaska.

  Now she stood in the arrival hall of a small airport with no air-conditioning, even though the temperature at eleven o’clock at night was not much cooler than back home in Richmond.

  She didn’t have a description of the police officer who was supposed to meet her, but she picked him out immediately. Was it the fatigued face, the sweat rings under the sleeves of his shirt, or the way he clung to his cell phone with his right hand, like a gunslinger just before a shoot-out?

  Singsaker spotted her just as quickly, even though the deep but odd female voice he’d heard on the phone didn’t really fit with her slight figure. Felicia Stone was a woman in her thirties with dark, shoulder-length hair and a pale complexion. She wore no makeup, which instantly struck him as a bit un-American. Her eyes were big and brown. He took an immediate liking to her.

  Singsaker pocketed his cell phone, went over, and offered to take her suitcase. She gave it to him and held out her right hand. Instead of putting down the suitcase he took her hand in his left and gave it a squeeze, introducing himself. He thought that the whole scene was a little awkward, as if they both had no idea what to say.

  “I’m Felicia Stone,” she told him.

  “I have a car outside,” he said.

  They moved toward the exit.

  “Some case, huh?” she said, although she didn’t sound convinced that her remark would break the ice.

  “Some case,” he said with a nod.

  * * *

  Singsaker didn’t really start a conversation until they drove off. She thought that was typical of men, that they didn’t like to talk while they were busy doing something else. Except driving, of course. But she didn’t say that out loud.

  He told her about everything that had happened since they last spoke.

  “Let me see the picture of this academic type with Silvia Freud,” she said when he finished bringing her up to date.

  He took out his cell and flipped through the photos as he kept half an eye on the road. When he found the right one, he handed her the phone. She recognized the man at once.

  “That’s him. John Shaun Nevins. He’s the suspect in our homicide,” she said, adding as if it were an unimportant detail, “Except for the fact that he has an airtight alibi.”

  “I hate airtight alibis,” said Singsaker.

  She laughed. It was the same dark laughter from the phone call.

  “But it’s clear that he has something to do with the case,” she said. “I was really hoping that you could tell me something that would unravel a bit of the riddle for us. Instead, it seems like all the threads are weaving together into an even tighter web.”

  “I agree. This case has turned into a real ball of confusion,” he said, unsure if he’d used the right English word. “But tell me about Nevins. He’s an academic, right?”

  “Actually, he does the same thing Silvia Freud does.”

  “A bookbinder?”

  “Conservator. Nevins works for the university library in Virginia, but he’s also known as a big book collector. Some of his fortune was earned buying and selling rare books. His late wife probably contributed most of the funds, though. A tobacco family.”

  “So he has money? Enough to invest a hefty sum in a book he could never allow to see the light of day?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s the type. It might be precisely the feeling of power that cowardly, rich men like him are looking for, combined with a childish need to own something that nobody else has.”

  Singsaker wondered if she was taking this case a bit too personally.

  “What joy would it give him if he can’t brag about it?” he asked.

  “If you’re self-centered enough, you don’t need to brag to anyone but yourself.” Again that dark laughter.

  He noticed that he was just as interested in Felicia Stone herself as he was in their conversation.

  “By the way, I have some bad news for you,” she added. “I received a message on my way here. There’s no record of a Jon Vatten traveling into or out of the United States in recent weeks. He was there earlier in the summer, as you know, but that was long before the murder. The same goes for Gunn Brita Dahle. She was there in the spring.”

  “I have a couple of other names I’d like you to check,” said Singsaker and gave them to her. He wrote them on a pad attached to the dashboard as he glanced at the road. She looked at the names and nodded.

  “I’ll e-mail my office about them. But we should probably focus on the two most likely candidates. Should we start with my guy or yours?” she asked with a sigh.

  “Mine has disappeared,” he said.

 
“And I don’t know where mine is at the moment. He’s supposed to be in Frankfurt.”

  “He could be anywhere by now. With or without the Johannes Book. I think we’ll have to start somewhere else.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s just an idea. But I think I’ll take you out to Fosen to visit a farmer out there.”

  She nodded wearily. Singsaker guessed she didn’t have the slightest clue as to what he was talking about, but he didn’t want to inundate her with too much information. She looked jet-lagged.

  “We’ll start tomorrow,” he said.

  She looked out the window.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a city somewhere in this wilderness?”

  He had to laugh. He’d never thought of Malvik as the wilderness. But it was probably all a matter of perspective.

  * * *

  Life is a chain of coincidences, and one of them was that Felicia Stone had booked a room at the Prinsen Hotel. After Singsaker had helped her take the luggage to her room, they went downstairs to the bar, and each had a pilsner. They tried not to talk about the case. He told her a little about Trondheim and the city’s history. She was more interested in the odd bowling game in the pub. But to her great surprise, he didn’t know the rules. At one o’clock he left to return the police car. There was more than a little alcohol in his bloodstream. Then he went home and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  * * *

  Vatten thought he heard a noise. He looked up at once, listening closely. The pines outside the cabin rustled in the plaintive September wind. A bird called vainly into the night. That was all. He kept listening. Yes, there it was again. Footsteps approaching on the path outside. He could hear them more clearly now. His hands and feet were bound with a stiff rope that scratched his wrists, making the skin burn. He tried not to move. Just lay there listening to the footsteps coming closer. How had he ended up here? When he opened the door at home, the crowbar had struck him instantly. He had no chance to see the kidnapper’s face.

  Then the door opened. In the dim light he recognized the man who’d come to kill him. Was he surprised? He didn’t know. All he knew was that his hatred from the past had returned. And now he had a face to direct it toward.

  The man spoke. “On the way up here I was thinking about Edgar Allan Poe. You like Poe, don’t you? Weren’t you at his museum this summer, in Virginia?”

  How does this shithead know that? Vatten thought. Nobody knew about that, did they?

  “I’ve been there myself. The garden has a mysterious air about it, don’t you think? I had a chance to see it at sunrise, which most people don’t get to do. It’s incredible to think that Poe has been immortalized like that. But few have been as dead as he was in his unmarked grave.”

  The kidnapper stopped talking and looked at Vatten, who was still concentrating on lying quietly.

  “Why are you so silent? I thought you’d appreciate the topic. You know, Poe was almost maniacally obsessed with death and bringing the dead back to life. Maybe that’s what literature is really about, waking up what is dead and breathing life into a world that’s gone?”

  The figure in front of him cocked his head. Only now did Vatten notice something he was holding in one hand. It was a rolled up piece of grayish-white skin. A kind of bundle. The odious man moved to the middle of the room, where a table stood. He laid the bundle on the table and unrolled it. Vatten raised his head. Inside the roll of skin were tools. There were knives in many shapes and sizes, scalpels, saws, and drills. It reminded Vatten of an illustration he’d once seen in a book. An old copperplate engraving from the 1500s. The picture showed all the necessary tools a good anatomist might need to perform a dissection. They were the same tools he now saw on the table.

  A pair of ominously calm eyes observed him from behind the table.

  “I have many excellent tools here. People don’t store them like this any longer.”

  Vatten suppressed a scream.

  “But the most interesting thing is the packaging itself.”

  In the light from the window Vatten could see that the inside of the skin that the knives were packed in had been scraped and prepared to make a smooth writing surface, like a piece of parchment, and that there was something written on it. The letters were big with curlicues, but they had begun to fade, fragile words struggling with encroaching invisibility. This was an old text.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Vatten said nothing but knew he was going to get an answer.

  “This is the climax of the Johannes Book. Scholars have known that some pages were missing. I’ve heard that they were recently rediscovered in Virginia. These pages reveal that Johannes the priest was himself a murderer who took the lives of victims in his parish, then flayed and dissected them before he buried them. I’ve known about this for a long time. What no one else knows is that a final page exists. One that was never included in the book yet was also written by Johannes. This parchment was used to pack the priest’s knives. He had quite a good selection. On the page I have here, he goes into more detail than anywhere else. Here he describes a vivisection. Tell me, Vatten, do you know what a vivisection is?”

  All Vatten knew about vivisection was that it involved being flayed and dissected while you were still alive. In the Renaissance it was occasionally performed on animals. Once he had read about a doctor in ancient times who had done it to a prisoner, but he had never quite believed it. Now it occurred to him what sort of fate had been planned for him. And he was honest enough with himself that he dreaded the pain. At the same time he realized that he’d done nothing but wait for death since Hedda and Edvard disappeared. And no matter how crazy it sounded, he thought that this wasn’t the worst way to die. This was the opposite of being buried alive. It was being opened up instead. Letting in the light so that everyone could see.

  “We are all books of blood,” said Vatten, resigned without knowing where the words came from. “No matter where you open us up, we are red.”

  “I’m liking you more and more. And that will just make things even more interesting.” The sound of the whetstone against the knife edge filled the room.

  * * *

  “Bringing the dead back to life,” said Felicia Stone. “That’s what we really want to do, isn’t it? That’s why we’re detectives. To create a story that will give meaning to a meaningless death.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” said Singsaker.

  “Relax,” she said with a laugh. “I just get philosophical in the morning before I have my coffee. I hope it comes soon.” She looked around for Egon.

  He had guessed that she, as an American, would go for the whole works for breakfast: eggs, bacon, and toast. But she had ordered only toast and coffee.

  “While you’ve been philosophizing, I’ve done some investigating. Silvia Freud hasn’t shown up, either at home or at work, since the last time we spoke. The same is true of Siri Holm. So now we have three people missing, four if you count Nevins, and no good leads. There are plenty of police on the case here in town. So I’ve decided to expand the investigation a bit outside of Trondheim. We’re going to talk to a farmer out on Fosen.”

  “Who is this farmer?”

  “He’s the previous owner of the Johannes Book, and since it seems that most things are circling around that book, I thought I’d have a talk with him. My boss, though dubious, has given me the green light to follow this lead, since we don’t have a single clue that ties directly to Vatten. But she really doesn’t want you to be involved. You have no authority on Norwegian territory, she says. Her plan is for me to sit here all morning and go over the case with you, then drive out to Fosen in the afternoon. But I think it’s a much better idea for you to come with me, then we can talk while we drive. There’ll be less downtime that way.”

  “Do you make a habit of not doing what your boss tells you?” Felicia Stone asked with a laugh.

  “All the time,” he lied.

  “It�
��s true that I have no jurisdiction here, but I do have a valid passport and can travel wherever I like,” she said with a sly smile. And from that moment he was no longer in doubt. He definitely liked her more than he should.

  28

  Felicia Stone stood on the top deck outside the café on the Fosen ferry. She leaned on the railing above the open deck and looked back toward Rissa and Trondheim, now hidden in the bay behind them. Her black hair danced in the wind and revealed a slim white neck, with skin so thin that the blood vessels were visible underneath. The temperature had dropped overnight, back to a normal level for September. Felicia, who had apparently been prepared for chilly Norway, wore a boyish green all-weather jacket with the hood removed. It looked like something a rather unfashionable hunter might wear.

  Singsaker emerged with two cups of black coffee and two small vanilla pancakes.

  “Norwegian ferry food,” he said, handing her a paper plate with a svele on it.

  “Thank you, but I’ve already had breakfast, and I’m not that keen on pancakes, at least not cold ones with no syrup,” she said, looking skeptically at the buttered svele, which had a thin layer of sugar on top.

  “This isn’t a pancake, it’s a svele. It’s a traditional Norwegian food,” he said, pretending to be offended. “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Thanks, anyway, I value honesty more than curiosity,” she said with a laugh.

  “And evidently more than our Norwegian national pride,” he said, laughing with her. He put the two sveler together to make a double one and took a bite. It was seldom he felt a rapport with anyone as quickly as he had with her. “You’re right to give our Norwegian national pride a kick. It’s as inflated as a soccer ball,” he added.

  “You certainly have a way with words,” she said with a smile. She took the coffee and gazed at the Trondheim Fjord. “This place reminds me of Alaska. Especially now that the temperature is lower,” she went on. “So many mountains and pine forests.”