– At last something other than gibberish, he said. – I’ve been thinking about it for so bloody long I’d almost forgotten.
– We can talk about it once we’ve got some distance to this business with Mailin.
– I want to talk about it now, he hissed. – This very moment. You don’t just toss out something like that and then leave.
– All right, then, she said, a little more feebly.
– For starters, where will Oda live?
– Oda? I don’t even want to discuss that.
Again that chuckle.
– Because you think it’s all a done deal, he said without raising his voice. – If it comes to a court case, there’s a thing or two I’ll have to tell them, you do know that?
Looking at him, she could see that he thought he was already beginning to get the upper hand. – No, I don’t know that. Certainly not.
He leaned well back in his chair. – Twice I’ve driven Oda to Casualty. Once with a broken arm. Once with burns on her chest. Do you think they’re complete morons down there? Don’t you think someone might have started putting two and two together?
She sat there, her mouth half open, waiting for him to start laughing. Yet another of his nasty, macabre jokes. And when that didn’t happen, she had to hit back.
– You’ll never get me to say that you were out with Lara when Mailin disappeared, understand? It was
me
who took Lara for a walk that evening. You didn’t come home until after eleven. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself hauled up to the police station and charged with giving false information, and while you’re there, you can submit your application for custody of Oda at the same time.
That hurt. He pulled out the toothpick, broke it into small pieces and showered them on to the tabletop.
– You don’t think I have anything to do with what happened to Mailin.
– You have no idea what I think, Pål. First you tell me exactly what you were doing that evening, and then I’ll tell you what I do and don’t think.
He pulled out his wry smile. She knew he felt he was charming when he smiled like that, sheepish and self-confident at the same time. Once upon a time she’d felt the same way about it; now it just looked like an empty pout. He practised a therapy that was supposed to help people who had wrapped their own bodies in armour, while he himself was progressively disappearing behind a shell. She had struggled to get inside it. Now the thought of what was in there disgusted her.
– You don’t want to know, he said. – You don’t want to know where I was.
She played her final card, the one she had been saving for last.
– Mailin found out what you were doing here in the evenings.
– Oh yeah, he said stiffly.
– She asked me if I knew about it.
– Really? And what did you say?
– I told her I knew all about what went on inside your office. That was the day before she went missing. That was the last thing I heard her say, that she was going to call in at your office to talk to you about it.
Torunn presumed that Tormod Dahlstrøm still had her number on his call list. So he would see that it was her who was ringing. He could answer, or at least call back. If he didn’t, it would confirm that she meant nothing to him.
Then his voice was there. – Tormod, he said, and she couldn’t go on sitting in the chair, she had to get up and pace the room. The thought of having him as her supervisor again now that Mailin was no longer there would have been too grotesque, and she didn’t think it.
– Hi, Tormod, she said weakly. – It’s Torunn.
She let the two names float together for a moment.
– I saw it was you, he said, and seemed relieved. – I’ve been meaning to call you.
She realised that he meant it. But also why he had been thinking of her.
– It’s just too awful, she said. – It’s unreal, I can’t get myself to believe it.
It was true. And yet it sounded hollow. She had many reasons for calling. This was the only one she could talk about. – I’ve been wondering about something Mailin said to me. I need to hear what you think.
She paused, and he didn’t interrupt. She had never had a better supervisor, and was only too aware of how stupid she had been to give him up. She’d let anger rule her, pretended to herself that she could hurt him like that. And maybe, in spite of it all, he had been hurt.
– A couple of years ago, Mailin had a patient she didn’t want to continue with. She terminated the treatment abruptly. She wasn’t the type to give up when the going got rough. But back then she seemed really afraid.
– Did she go into any detail about what happened? Dahlstrøm asked.
– She had just taken him on. It was in the early days of her PhD, and she was considering making him a part of it. I’m pretty sure he threatened her.
– Any idea who this patient might have been?
– I never met him. And Mailin never mentioned a name. I’ve no idea if he was recommended by a doctor. Social services might know, I’m sure I can find out roughly when he was here. Maybe she talked to you about it.
She knew that it would take a lot for him to reveal anything of what was said in his sessions as Mailin’s supervisor.
– I think I know what you’re referring to, he said. – It was something that happened several years ago, and Mailin didn’t think she needed supervision to talk about it. That might mean she didn’t think the episode was quite as serious as the impression you got of it. Quite a number of the people she was treating are unstable and quick tempered.
– The police were here today. They want access to her filing cabinet. I don’t think they’ll find anything there. It’s almost empty. Things connected with her thesis, but no names. I don’t know where she kept that kind of thing.
Dahlstrøm was silent for a few moments. Then he said: – I have a list of the patients who were involved in her study. I’ll get in touch and urge each one of them to contact the police.
Torunn felt that she could hardly trust her voice any more. – I should have said something about this before, she managed to say.
– You did what you could, Torunn. It’s easy to reproach yourself. We just have to help each other the best we can.
His comforting words were too much for her. She let him hear that she was crying before closing the conversation, without mentioning any of the things that she most needed to talk to him about.
R
OAR
H
ORVATH SPENT
an hour preparing himself. He scrolled through hundreds of documents on the internet, printed out a few articles, including one from an obscure website calling itself baalzebub.com. Elijah Frelsøi – Berger’s real name – grew up in Oslo. A pupil at Kampen school, and then on to Hersleb. After secondary school he studied theology. His family were members of the Pentecostal church. Frelsøi broke with them at the age of eighteen and took his mother’s name, Bergersen. Active in the circles around the anarchist publication
Street Paper
. At the same time a member of several punk rock bands, and started one of his own, Hell’s Razors, later Baalzebub, who kept going until the end of the eighties. After that, he worked as a solo artist under the name Berger. Had several hits in the nineties. Lyrics dealing with desire and faith, low key and often acoustic. At the same time wrote several shows, appeared in them himself, and over time developed a format in which he sang his own songs interspersed with a pure stand-up comedy routine. Typically this involved sharp attacks on the powerful in Norwegian society and, in due course, the powerless as well. Early in the 2000s, Berger was given his own show on NRK, but it was taken off air after just three broadcasts, officially because of poor viewing figures. He did a season as a stand-up-rock satirist on TV2. Contract not renewed despite the fact that it was the show people talked about. Early this autumn, he suddenly reappeared again, brought in from the cold by the newly established Channel Six. In the course of a few months, well before Mailin Bjerke went missing, Berger’s TV show
Taboo
made the front pages of the tabloids more than ten times:
Berger defends drug use in athletes … Berger attacks ‘feminist fannies’ … Berger eats marzipan pig in shape of Muhammad … Berger a heroin user … Berger a paedophile?
Roar recalled that one of his best friends, a journalist on Romerikes Blad, had interviewed the infamous TV talk-show host. He left a message on his voicemail before heading down into the garage and taking out a service car.
He was passing Slotts Park when his friend called back.
– Dan-Levi here, you called me.
Roar fiddled with the hands-free and almost didn’t see the tram that turned down Henrik Ibsen’s Street.
– I’m guessing you didn’t call me to say that you’re still into swearing and various other forms of sinful behaviour, he heard from the other end.
Dan-Levi Jakobsen had been Roar’s best friend from primary school onwards. As the oldest son of a pastor in the Pentecostal church, he was condemned to an outsider’s existence, especially during the secondary school years. Roar probably exaggerated his own sense of being different that came from the fact that he was half Hungarian. Later he came to realise that every single pupil at Kjellervolla school felt like an outsider in those days. Most of them managed to hide it, but the pastor’s son Dan-Levi never had a chance, and nor did Roar, with his surname. To make up for it, they cultivated a fellowship based on their own version of ‘I’m black and I’m proud’. Deep down, the fear of being like everyone else was probably greater than the fear of being rejected.
– Dan-Levi, I called you for two reasons. In the first place, it’s getting on for three years since we last went out for a drink.
In actual fact it had been something like three months. Roar was using irony to try to put his old friend on the defensive. Dan-Levi was a father of four and still unassailably married to his teenage sweetheart, Sara. That she had originally been Roar’s girlfriend, and the first with whom he went further than a bit of necking in the back row of the cinema, was one of the few things they never joked about.
– I’m ready when you are,
señor
, his friend parried. – You’re the one who’s let himself get stuck in that swamp of a so-called capital city.
– You’re right. I get homesick just thinking about the smell of the river Nitelva.
After moving from Lillestrøm eighteen months ago, leaving behind the wreck of a marriage and a heap of friends all wondering which of the two exes they should stay in touch with, Roar took every opportunity to trash the place. It had conned its way into being called a town. The town centre was a cross between a dump and a permanent building site. The football team was nothing but a gang of grouchy old peasants,
und so weiter
. None of it was particularly seriously meant, but it felt liberating to say it.
– That was the first thing, said Dan-Levi after they’d agreed to meet at Klimt on New Year’s Day. – What was the other thing?
– I’m wondering about an interview you did a few years back. But you must promise that this is strictly between us.
Dan-Levi swore. Roar couldn’t actually see him cross his heart and hope to die, but his old journalist buddy was someone he trusted, and he’d been very helpful to Roar during his years at Romerike police station. In return, Roar had given Dan-Levi tip-offs that brought the local paper a number of scoops.
– I’m on my way to interview Berger, said Roar. – Give me a bit of gen on the guy.
– Are you suggesting there might be some connection between Berger and this woman they found down in Hurum? Dan-Levi exclaimed.
– No comment, said Roar in English. – I’m the one asking the questions here. I want everything you know about him. Weak points, what to look out for,
und so weiter
. I’m asking because you interviewed the guy. And because Berger has deep roots in the Pentecostal movement. Once a Pentacostalist, always a Pentacostalist. I’m sure you know people who can talk about his childhood among the speakers in tongues.
– You want to get hold of someone who can tell you whether the guy had psychopathic tendencies even as a child? What’s in it for me?
– A beer. Maybe two.
A few moments’ silence.
– I’ll try and dig up something by Thursday, said Dan-Levi finally. – But here’s a tip to be going on with: don’t reveal anything about yourself when you talk to him. When I turned up for the interview, I’d hardly finished introducing myself before he started asking me about the Pentecostal movement. He claimed that my name was the giveaway. After that, he was the one grilling me, not the other way around, not for a moment.
B
ERGER LIVED AN
apartment in Løvenskiolds Street. The registered owner was someone called Odd Løkkemo, Roar had discovered, and when the door was opened by a man with a reddish-grey rim of hair around his head, he showed his ID and said: – Might you be Odd Løkkemo.
– Might be, the man responded testily. His eyes were red rimmed, as though he had just been crying.
Roar informed him that he had an appointment to see Berger. The man who might have been Løkkemo turned his head. – Elijah, he shouted. – Visitor for you.
The feminine voice and the way he sashayed down the hallway and into a room were enough to persuade Roar that he shared more than just a kitchen with the TV celebrity.
No one emerged to greet him, and rather than just stand there pathetically waiting in the entrance, Roar stepped inside and opened the first door he came to. It led to a bathroom. It looked to have been newly decorated, with tiled walls in the style of the old Roman baths and a large jacuzzi in one corner. Still no sign of life out in the hallway. Roar opened one of the cupboards. Towels and face cloths on shelves. In the next one he found tubes and bottles of pills, most of them prescribed for E. Berger. Co-codamol, he noted. Temgesic. A few morphine tablets. He made a note of the name of the prescribing doctor. Not that he thought he might get something out of him, but it might be interesting to find out if this was someone who was casual about prescribing opiates.