Authors: Jorgen Brekke
The way the teenager smacked her chewing gum really pissed her off. “Do you really need to sound like a walrus drowning in its own spit?” Why did she say such absurd things? They hardly ever had a normal conversation anymore. And yet, they’d once been so close. Even Julie’s singing annoyed Elise lately. It always woke her up. But not this morning.
All night she’d drifted in and out of dreams that were weighted with so many different thoughts. She had been arguing with Ivar, Julie, and herself about the strangest things, like Internet fees and the need for sunscreen during Easter vacation. It was odd to wake up to a silent house. Ivar breathed quietly beside her, almost as if he were making an effort not to disturb. She looked at his pale nose sticking out at the edge of the duvet. His nostrils flared and constricted with a calculated calm. She found it terribly irritating.
The bedroom door stood open, just as it always did. They had gotten into the habit of leaving the door ajar when Julie was little because she used to climb into their bed at night. And they’d never given up the habit. Right across from their bedroom was the bathroom, and that was where the sound should be coming from. Elise should have heard Julie singing behind the closed door, like she always did in the morning. She remembered when waking up to that song had been the best thing in the world.
She got up and thought back on last night. Julie had shown her an expensive pair of pants that she’d bought, and even though Elise knew her daughter had spent her own allowance on them, she’d still called her a stupid teenage diva. She could have said it like she was joking, but she hadn’t. She had meant the words to hurt. They’d slipped out, and Julie hadn’t replied. She’d just turned on her heel, put Bismarck on his leash, and left for their evening walk.
That had opened Elise’s eyes. I can’t keep on this way, she thought. So she had crept into bed alongside Ivar, who was already asleep. I’m a terrible mother, she had whispered to him as he dreamed. He had merely grunted and kept on sleeping. So Elise had lain in bed, listening for the door, the humming in the hallway, the dog shaking the snow off his coat. But she had fallen asleep before Julie came back.
But I was awake for a long time, wasn’t I? she thought now.
She went into the hall and opened the bathroom door. Everything was just as she’d left it last night. No towels or dirty clothes tossed on the floor. And the top was on the toothpaste tube.
Without thinking, she went to the front door and pulled it open, staring out at the yard. It was not yet daylight. The frosty vapor issuing from her mouth made the world seem hazy, and she stood there, peering vacantly into the white space between the big trees.
Then out of old habit she looked down and found the newspaper lying on the doorstep. She read the front-page headline, which was about that awful thing that had happened on Ludvig Daaes Gate. It had shocked the whole neighborhood. For two days afterward she had forbidden Julie to go out alone after dark. But her daughter had refused to obey, which led to more arguments. So Elise had finally relented, though with a bad feeling in her stomach.
With a rising sense of alarm she went into the kitchen. The counter was clean, without a single crumb on it. In the living room, Bismarck wasn’t sprawled on his pillow. For a moment she stood there, motionless, as if it were a great effort to draw a breath. Slowly, taking off-tempo steps, she went over to her daughter’s bedroom. It was at the other end of the living room. An idiotic question suddenly occurred to her: Why did they sleep so far apart? For a moment she wondered if she were going crazy. Then she thought, This is just a dream. A horrible nightmare.
She stood outside her daughter’s bedroom door for what seemed like a long time. Then she gathered her courage and opened the door.
In his mind,
Grälmakar Löfberg relived the murder again and again, which was no more than a few days old. Sometimes he dwelled only on a single blow, a drop of blood, or a flash in her eyes. Other times, like now, he recalled the entire course of events and the atmosphere that had settled over everything. The blows, the sounds, the smell of blood and sweat, the dim light in the basement storeroom. He thought about everything. It was the only thing that gave him any sense of calm.
He heard his own voice from that night with Silje Rolfsen.
“Sing!”
Then came the images.
The knife blade made a little hollow in the skin of her neck but did not cut all the way through. It wouldn’t, since he held it very still, and she didn’t move.
“Sing!” he repeated, taking the knife away so she could breathe. He turned it and set the point against her larynx.
Then she sang. He got up, taking the knife with him, and left the storeroom, locking the door behind him. He lay down on the mattress in the hall and listened to her singing. She had memorized every note and every verse. He heard her voice through the thin door, muted, like sound drifting in from someone else’s apartment. For a while he thought he was getting drowsy, that he was drifting off to sleep. But his eyes refused to close. Then he heard the fly buzzing inside his head.
It wasn’t working like it was supposed to.
Finally he got up slowly, leaned down, and put on a CD. It was Bellman. He turned up the volume. Then he went back into the storeroom. She had stopped singing. She stood there, her feet apart and her head bowed toward the floor.
He grabbed her by the hair and threw her against the wall. Her scream made him feel calmer. He slapped her cheek.
“Please don’t. Please, please don’t,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“You’re not going anywhere, dear,” he said.
And finally she understood.
She huddled on the floor. He threw himself at her, yanked her up, and kicked her in the stomach. She flew backward, rammed against the far wall, and then pitched forward. Slowly, she got back on her feet, motioned to him with one hand, muttering something, and then dropped to her knees. He lifted her up and pressed her back against the wall as he struck her. It was like hitting a mattress. Then everything inside her seemed to surrender all at once, and she sank to the floor. Her knees buckled; her head drooped. But then, a fraction of an inch at a time, she pulled herself up again.
She couldn’t speak; she couldn’t hear; she couldn’t see. It was beyond his comprehension how she was able to breathe or stay upright. But she raised her head, made a few gurgling noises, and stretched her arms out to the sides. She stood like that for a moment; then she stumbled toward him. A clear tone issued from her throat, as if she were trying to sing one last time. Or maybe it was a plea.
He punched her on the chin. She fell to the floor like a sack of cement, and this time she didn’t get up.
“… where time and death unite beauty and foulness in the same dust…”
Behind him he could hear Åkerström’s fervent bass voice.
The music filled the entire basement, coming from the little CD player next to the mattress outside the storeroom. The music made his thoughts float. He felt exhausted, as if all the blows had struck him instead of her, and he collapsed onto the mattress with the images of her motionless body imprinted on his retinas.
Now, several days later, he could still conjure up those images. They brought him peace.
* * *
Singsaker could feel the pressure against his chest, and the blood being pumped into the spongelike network of capillaries just under the surface of his skin. He had opened his eyes and could see the darkness below him, blurry through the salt water, like a question with no answer, a case with no resolution.
He hovered like that, staring through the waters with both arms stretched out to the sides. This numbness in his skin bordered on paralysis. It was no longer possible to determine whether he was freezing or warm. His body had somehow been set free, as well as his thoughts. It felt like an eternity, though it lasted only a few seconds. He couldn’t hold his head under the ice-cold water any longer than that. Then he kicked his legs. It was a reflex and not a controlled action, but it happened every time he did this, and he shot upward. He still had his eyes open, and he could see the sun flailing like a golden octopus on the surface where a thin membrane of slushy ice had settled. He broke through, gasping for air at just about the same spot he’d jumped in. The surrounding water was still full of bubbles. Then he bellowed like a kid:
“What the fuck! It’s just as bad every time!”
“And just as good,” replied Thorvald Jensen, who was already sitting on the dock with a towel wrapped around him.
Singsaker swam quickly over to the ladder and climbed up to join his colleague.
“Good?” he said, grabbing the other towel from the dock. “It’s times like this that make me think it might actually snow in hell.”
Jensen smiled.
“Even Dante knew that. Wasn’t it the traitors who ended up in Cocytus, the ice sea in the ninth inner circle of hell?”
“So if I betray you and give up this insane ice-bathing thing, is that where I’ll end up too?” asked Singsaker, smiling wryly.
“Ironic, isn’t it?’ said Jensen.
They had issued a challenge to each other after the crazy homicide case in the fall. It was Jensen’s idea. They would go swimming once a week all winter long. People said it was good for the health. Singsaker couldn’t say whether that was why he’d accepted the challenge, or if it was because his life had been turned upside down in so many ways during the past year and that one more silly whim didn’t really make any difference. Jensen had told him that he’d always been an avid open-air bather but that for a long time he’d dreamed of also being an ice bather, so he might as well get started before it was too late. Jensen was two years younger than Singsaker, so he too was approaching sixty. Singsaker had never had enough imagination to swim in the winter. He alternated between reproaching and admiring his friend—all depending on whether it was before or after their weekly swim—for this ice-cold lunacy.
He rubbed his body with the towel, the feeling starting to return to his skin. After a while he wrapped the towel around his waist, and together the two middle-aged policemen went back to the locker room. Singsaker was tall and rail-thin, even though he never worked out and only went hiking on the rare occasions when Jensen persuaded him to join him for a hunting expedition. Jensen, who was a real outdoorsman, had a solid paunch he’d never been able to shed, no matter how many heath-covered slopes he hiked in the fall.
Their old, naked bodies reminded Singsaker of two Roman citizens on their way out of the frigidarium, the cold section of the Roman baths. But the locker room of the swim club in Trondheim was about as different as you could get from Thermae Agrippae. While they got dressed, he thought about how nice a steam bath would have felt. But Jensen was in the conservative group of the swim club, those who probably would have chained themselves to the locker room to prevent the construction of anything like that. It was only because Jensen was a member of the club’s hard-core group that they were allowed to borrow the key in the wintertime. The club was actually only open in the summer. Ice bathing was viewed with a certain skepticism by anyone other than the most dedicated open-air bathers in Trondheim.
Afterwards Singsaker locked the door to the swim facilities. Jensen was a clever one. He had let Odd keep the only key to the building, but several weeks passed before Singsaker understood why. If he had the key, he would have to show up. He couldn’t use some pretext to get out of swimming, because if he didn’t come, Jensen couldn’t swim either. His colleague was a master at combining cynicism with friendship.
Together they walked from the pier to the police station. Jensen was on duty, but Singsaker had the day off. He couldn’t say that he envied his colleague, since a pall had hovered over the department for the past few days.
Grongstad’s prediction that they’d find very little evidence at the crime scene was correct. There was no organic material that might have given them DNA of anyone besides the victim. The heavy snowfall had effectively erased all footprints, and because of the cold weather, the killer had probably been bundled up and wearing gloves. Not even a partial fingerprint had been found on the music box. The truth was that they had almost nothing to go on.
In his final autopsy report, Dr. Kittelsen had confirmed that the victim had been severely beaten. She died when her throat was cut.
Singsaker, alone now, trudged along and crossed the bridge over to Bakklandet. He enjoyed walking through his city. It made him feel like a civilian, one of the people whose safety he had dedicated his life to protecting.
One time, a colleague from Bergen who had spent a few years working Homicide, had told Singsaker that the citizens of Bergen were patriotic but that those who lived in Trøndelag had a reason for their patriotism. He may have just been trying to ingratiate himself, but he did have a point. The people of Trøndelag were always the best, whether it was soccer, skiing, music, research, or merely being Norwegian. They were people who made their dreams come true. But Singsaker was a homicide detective. He knew that people’s nightmares were just as awful here as any other place, and at times those nightmares came true. But he loved his city, both the good and the bad, and on clear winter mornings like this, it seemed to him the only place in the world to live.
Eventually he arrived at Baklandet Skydsstation.
The ramshackle tavern looked like it might topple into the street at any moment. Singsaker sat down at his usual table near the entrance. He hadn’t gone out much during the last years of first his marriage, but ever since Felicia had come into his life, he’d decided that he should take her out for dinner once in a while. When he discovered that Baklandet Skydsstation served an excellent herring platter with homemade Danish rye bread, he’d started coming here on his days off to have lunch, often without Felicia. He’d become such a steady customer that the waiters had started to greet him by name.
He ordered his usual and then began leafing through the newspaper that lay on the table. The crime reporter Vlado Taneski, who wrote for
Adresseavisen,
was not Singsaker’s favorite, but in the coverage of this particular case, he’d balanced the gravity of the situation with his obvious satisfaction at writing about something that was not confined to the city of Trondheim. If Singsaker felt any respect at all for Taneski, he might have been impressed.