Death By Water (16 page)

– I told you that.

– All the same, perhaps I should tell them about these photos. Don’t you think?

Liss said nothing for a moment. Inside her head, everything was still spinning. The image of Zako on the sofa. Hands washing bottles beneath a tap. Her own hands.

– I don’t think so.

– Why not?

Judith van Ravens’ voice was sharper, as though at any moment the doubt could turn into suspicion.

– I want the police to find my sister. That’s all that matters. If they start getting a lot of confusing information, it’ll take them longer, and by then it might be too late. Surely you can understand that.

She drank the rest of the coffee that had been brought to her table. Had no reason to be sitting there. Had nowhere else to go. Put her hand down into her bag for her cigarettes and touched something else. She lifted out the notebook she’d taken from Mailin’s office. Sat there studying how her sister had written her name inside the cover. Then she wrote her own name, imitating the calligraphy. Mailin had always been able to use her head better than her. Mailin was stronger, had more endurance, but somehow her hands seemed to live in a different world.

Liss.

She sat for a long time and looked at the four letters.

Liss is Mailin’s sister,
she wrote.
Liss Bjerke
.

Liss Bjerke contacts the police. She hasn’t heard from them. Does she know something that might help them find Mailin?

The appointment on 11 December, the afternoon she went missing: JH.

The image of Zako lying on the sofa paled as she sat there writing. Didn’t disappear, but detached itself from her other thoughts.

Thinking about you helps, Mailin.

What was it you were going to tell Berger before the TV broadcast?

Viljam knows. Get him to tell you.

Had no idea where she got that from. She ordered another espresso. The waiter was from the Middle East, probably, or maybe Pakistan. The way he was looking at her was easy to interpret. He wanted her body without knowing anything else about who she was. It was uncomplicated. Awakened something in her, something she had control over. She held his gaze so long that in the end he was the one who had to look away. He returned, put her coffee on the table, remained standing there as though waiting for something.

– Do you want me to pay now?

– Pay when you leave.

He leaned slightly towards her. He had a dense growth of hair and thick eyebrows. He smelt strongly of something fatty and salty, disgusting in a way that for a few seconds allowed her to stop thinking.

As he walked back to the counter, she followed him with her eyes. So intensely did she scrutinise the broad back and the narrow hips that he must have noticed it.

She took the notebook out again.

Tell Mailin everything. About what happened in Bloemstraat.

Zako was choked. Someone put sleeping tablets in his beer.

What would you have said, Mailin?

You would have told me to talk to someone or other about it.

Ring Dahlstrøm.

She sat for a few moments, pressing the pen against a point on her forehead.

You mustn’t go away, Mailin. I need you.

T
ORMOD
D
AHLSTRØM TOOK
her hand and held it tightly, obviously to express his sympathy. She knew he was somewhere in his mid-fifties, but there was something about him that made him seem younger. It wasn’t the jutting chin or the outline of the almost bald head beneath the thin crest of fair hair. Maybe the deep-set pale blue eyes. She had met him for the first time four years previously. The second time was six months ago, when he attended the conference in Amsterdam with Mailin. He was one of the keynote speakers, said Mailin proudly, and insisted that Liss take them to a really good restaurant. Liss had her suspicions about why her sister was so keen, but went along with it anyway. For some years Dahlstrøm had had a regular column in
Dagbladet
where people could write in about their problems. He advised them on their marital difficulties, gambling and drug addictions, infidelities, lack of libido, and eating disorders. On this latter topic he had written several books, Mailin pointed out to her.

His office was in a daylight basement room in his villa, with a view of the garden and some spruce trees in a copse along Frognerseter Way.

– Does she still come to you for mentoring? Liss asked after sitting down in the soft leather chair.

– Did you know that? He seemed surprised. – Mailin doesn’t usually reveal whom she’s going to for mentoring, does she?

– She tells me lots of things. She trusts me.

– I didn’t mean it like that, Dahlstrøm reassured her.

She hadn’t taken it that way either, but she had an idea that Mailin had talked to him about her, and now she sat there with an uncomfortable feeling that he knew what was going on in her head.

He poured coffee from a thermos, tasted it, made a face, offered to brew a fresh pot. She said no. There was a girl of about her own age sitting in the waiting room. – I won’t take up much of your time, I know you’re busy.

– I’m glad you want to talk to me, he said.

Liss had always felt a need to be on the alert when she was with her sister’s colleagues. When she was younger and Mailin introduced her to her fellow students, she had had the idea that psychologists could see through people, and that the slightest thing she said or did, or even thought, might give her away. In time her belief in such magical powers faded, and instead she had to guard against her own irritation, control that urge to provoke that all therapists aroused in her. Twice she had started in treatment and both times terminated after a few sessions. She had sworn never again to see a psychologist, and definitely not a psychiatrist.

Dahlstrøm was a psychiatrist.

– I’m having trouble functioning normally, he added. – At the moment it’s hard to think of anything apart from Mailin.

It sounded as though he meant it. He began by asking how things were at home in Lørenskog, and she had no problem talking about her mother’s reaction, or about Tage’s well-meaning but hopeless attempts to comfort her. But Dahlstrøm also wanted to know how she was coping.

– What’s your opinion on that TV show Mailin was supposed to be on? she interrupted.

He ran a finger over the depression in the bridge of his nose; it was crooked and looked to have been broken. Sitting in the Vermeer restaurant in Amsterdam, he had joked about how he used to box when he was younger.

– I mentor Mailin on the treatment of patients, he answered. – Anything else she does is none of my business. But if she had asked, I would have advised against having anything to do with Berger and what he’s up to.

– So you don’t like him either, Liss pressed.

Dahlstrøm appeared to be thinking this over.

– Any bully with a minimum of talent who is sufficiently ruthless is doomed to succeed, he said.

– There’s no harm in laughing at ourselves, is there?

– On the contrary, Liss, it’s good for us. But for those of us who work with the victims of cynicism, the world looks a little different.

He put one leg over the other and leaned back. – There is nothing we aren’t prepared to joke about. No matter what you say about sex or death or God, you won’t be breaking any taboos. Not as long as you do it ironically. Seriousness is the only taboo of our age. Taboo has migrated from content to form.

Liss said suddenly: – Mailin found out something about him. Something Berger’s supposed to have done. She was going to expose it on TV that evening. She was due to meet him directly before the show to give him a chance to cancel the broadcast.

– How do you know this?

– Viljam, her partner.

But I don’t know if I can trust him
, she was on the point of adding.

Dahlstrøm sat up straight. – Have the police been informed of this?

– Viljam has tried to tell them. But they don’t seem interested. At least according to him.

– They have to work through a great many possibilities.

– I don’t think they’re doing anything at all.

– That isn’t correct, Dahlstrøm said firmly. – But I’ll make a call. I know someone at police headquarters you can talk to.

Liss prepared to bring the conversation to a close. She noticed how good it felt to sit with this man whom Mailin admired and trusted. If she went on sitting there much longer, she might end up telling him things she didn’t want him to know.

– It’s impossible to imagine someone hurting Mailin.

Dahlstrøm nodded. – Mailin is what I would call a fundamentally decent human being. But she’s also courageous, which means she makes enemies. On top of that, she’s spent a long time working in a landscape that is basically a minefield.

He sat there, brow wrinkled, looking out of the window.

– I know you can’t tell me anything about Mailin’s patients, said Liss. – But I know she’s working on a doctoral thesis about incest and that kind of thing. That’s no secret?

– Of course not. It’s going to be published … She’s studying a group of young men who have been the subject of serious abuse.

– Is it possible one of them might have harmed her?

Dahlstrøm hesitated before answering: – When Mailin started this study a couple of years ago, she chose seven men who she was going to follow over a period of time. She was very careful to find victims who had not themselves become perpetrators.

He raised his coffee cup, changed his mind, put it down again. – What is it that enables a vicious circle of sexual violence and abuse to be broken? What makes some people choose to endure the pain inflicted on them without taking it out on other innocents? That is what she wants to study.

Liss thought this through.

– You can’t know for certain whether one of the seven she ended up with hasn’t abused someone else, she objected. – Even though they might deny it when asked.

– That is correct. Mailin can only relate to what they tell her about themselves, and to the fact that they have no criminal record. But we’ve reached the limit of what I can discuss with you, Liss. I hope you understand that.

– But you will go to the police with what you know, if any of her patients have threatened her?

– You can rest assured that I will do everything I can to prevent anything happening to Mailin …

– But she’s been missing for six days, Liss protested. – We can’t just sit calmly and wait.

– I’m not doing that, he assured her. – I’ve already spoken to the police, and I’ll speak to them again.

– I’ll have to do that too, she mumbled.

Dahlstrøm looked quizzically at her. Now you can say it; she heard the thought race through her. You have killed a person, Liss Bjerke.

– I am her sister, after all, she added quickly. – No one knows her better than me.

Dahlstrøm’s gaze was on her the whole time and took in everything. He wouldn’t have been in a moment’s doubt about what she ought to do … She had to get out of this chair now, before she started talking and was unable to stop.

I
N THE EVENING
, she took the bus out to Lørenskog. Had no other place to go. Tage had given her a spare key. He didn’t say anything, just put it into her hand as she was going out the door the day before.

She let herself in.

– Is that you, Tage? She heard her mother’s voice from the living room

Liss shuffled in. Her mother was sitting on the sofa, in exactly the same place as she had been a day and a half earlier. She had lit a candle; there was a pile of newspapers on the table in front of her, and she had a book in her hands.

– Are you hungry, Liss? I can heat something up for you.

Liss wasn’t hungry. She’d forced down half a kebab before heading for the bus. Didn’t want to do anything else but get up to her room and curl up in bed.

She sat in the chair at the end of the table.

– I am sorry, her mother said.

– For what?

Her mother put the book down. – I’m glad you’re here, Liss.

Liss gave a quick nod.

– But right at the moment it’s impossible to be happy about anything, her mother continued.

– I know.

– There are so many things I’d like to ask you about. About Amsterdam. About what you’re up to these days.

Liss got up, went out into the kitchen, put some coffee on. Returned with cups, glasses and a jug of water.

– Are those new clothes? Isn’t that something Mailin usually wears?

– Had to borrow some of hers. Didn’t have time to pack a change of clothing.

Her mother raised her hand and stroked the bottle-green cashmere cardigan. Maybe that was a smile moving in her face.

– How long can you stay? she asked.

Liss poured them both a glass of water. It was colder than ice. She emptied a whole glass, a thin string of pain flashed through her throat and down into her shoulder.

– I’m not leaving until we know.

Not until Mailin has been found
, she added silently.

To stave off the silence, she said: – What are you reading?

Her mother picked up the book. –
The Charterhouse of Parma
.

She held it up in the air, as though to prove to Liss that a book with that title really did exist.

– Stendhal, she continued. – Always read Stendhal when I need to find a place to get away from it all.

Liss sat in Tage’s office, switched on the computer. He’d given her the password for the guest log-in.

She opened Google. In the search field she typed:
manslaughter
+
range of sentence.
Deleted it. Typed instead:
death by water
, the words Mailin had scribbled on the Post-it note pinned to the noticeboard in her office. 46,700 hits. Articles about poisoned water, Silicon Valley, and Shakespeare’s Ophelia. She was too restless to start sorting through the chaos and instead ran a search for
Berger
+
Taboo
. Over twelve thousand hits. Clicked into Wikipedia. Before calling himself Berger, the talk show host’s name was Elijah Bergersen, or Elijah Frelsøi. Studied theology. Formed the rock band Baalzebub in 1976; a career as a solo artist followed. A couple of hits in the mid-nineties. Later best known as a stand-up comedian, and most recently on television with a number of controversial productions.