Death By Water (38 page)

– Liss Bjerke … The name sounded from the darkness in front of her and at the same time inside her. As though it had left her and was now speaking to her from the doorway behind the torch beam. But the voice wasn’t hers, it was light and slightly hoarse, and still had that American accent that was once so exciting but now seemed fake and showy.

– What are you doing here, she said.

She heard his low laughter.

– You’ve always been such a cheeky little minx, Liss. Breaking into people’s property in the middle of the night and then asking them what
they
are doing there.

Pål Øvreby came a step closer. – Okay, I’ll explain. Sometimes when I have an evening out and it gets late, instead of taking a taxi home I come here and get a few hours’ sleep at the office. As you discovered a long time ago, I rent here. Five thousand two hundred and fifty every fucking month. So now I’ve answered your question, please tell me what
you
are doing here.

She couldn’t see his face properly, but could smell him. Tobacco and beer, and clothes that hadn’t been properly dried after washing. The smell forced its way into her and took the lid off containers with things she had hidden away. They were full of little animals. Now they began to crawl around inside her, from her head and all the way down her body.

– This is Mailin’s office. No one can stop me from coming here. She tried to sound angry. If her voice sounded angry, she might manage to feel anger.

– You came to me before, Liss, you didn’t suppose I’d forgotten? It wouldn’t surprise me if you knew that I was sleeping in the office at the moment. My home life is shot to pieces.

He was standing right up close to her.

– And it’s partly because of you, Liss Bjerke, he whispered. – It has a lot more to do with you than you realise.

He put his hand under her chin, lifted it, as if she was a child refusing to look him in the eye. – We had a good time together, Liss. You don’t expect me to have forgotten that, do you?

He let his finger glide around her ear, the back of her neck, pulled her towards him.

She grabbed the torch from his hand, shone it into his face.

– Do you suppose, Pål Øvreby, that I’m afraid to kill? she hissed, and heard how her own voice sounded like a steel string. – If you touch me one more time, you will never feel safe again, not for one second. I’ll kill you the instant you fall asleep.

He dropped his hand. She drove the torch into his stomach, slipped around him, out into the waiting room and down the steps. He didn’t follow.

J
ENNIFER
P
LÅTERUD SAT
shivering with cold in the Bingfoss Hall. Over five years and she still hadn’t quite understood what you could and couldn’t do in handball, but it didn’t matter that much. She celebrated when her younger son Sigurd’s team scored, and agreed with the views of the parents who seemed to understand what was going on. She liked the sport, although not enough to bother to learn all the rules. It made the boys tough to go banging into each other and get knocked about. They were pushed to the ground and had to get up again without moaning. Very different from football, which Trym, her older boy, had played. There they learned to lie there writhing about as soon as anyone touched them. It looked as if getting knocked about a bit was all part of handball, and Sigurd was anyway a tougher lad than his big brother. The toughness was something he’d inherited from his mother, but in Trym, who was two years older, she recognised his father’s laziness and evasiveness, and a bit more too.

During the break she went outside and took out her phone. For the second time in the course of the last twenty-four hours she called Detective Chief Inspector Viken, enjoying the suppressed irritation in his voice once she’d told him what the call was about.

– And you’re still doing everything you can to persuade Liss Bjerke to come to us directly with her information, he said sourly.

– I’m not going to answer that, she replied. – It’s not my fault if she has zero confidence in you.

How on earth did you manage to handle her so clumsily?
she felt like adding, but didn’t want to get into an open quarrel with the DCI.

– Isn’t it better if she gets in touch with me rather than keeps what she knows to herself? she said instead.

In the final analysis Viken probably agreed that she had a point. – It sounds as though she might have managed to work out what her sister is saying in that video, he continued in a more composed tone. – Had you ever heard of this Ferenczi?

Jennifer couldn’t suppress a little laugh. No specialist branch of medicine was more remote to her than psychiatry, which she associated with waffle, a lack of method, and absolutely no demand for results. But she’d googled Sándor Ferenczi in the morning after Liss’s call and got over 112,000 hits.

– He’s written a lot about children who have been abused, she informed him. – According to Liss, her sister was using his theories in her PhD studies. If I might be so bold as to make a suggestion, it would be to take a closer look at that thesis. Mailin Bjerke interviewed and apparently treated young men who had been the subject of abuse.

Midway through the second half of the game, Roar Horvath called. For some reason or other she knew it would be him even before she looked at the display.

– Just a moment, she said, and made her way out towards the exit.

– Need to talk to you, Jenny, he said, and standing out in the cold grey mist drifting up from the River Glomma, she felt herself blushing. – I was in Bergen yesterday. Was going to call you but it was past midnight by the time I got home.

If it was just about this trip to Bergen, he could have rung someone else.

– You don’t need fancy excuses if you want to meet me, she said with a glance at her watch. She could be in Manglerud in a couple of hours, but then had a sudden thought that was immediately very hard to resist. Ivar was at an agricultural conference with his brother-in-law for the weekend, and she’d be able to farm the two boys out with friends for the night.

She sat, leaning back in the kitchen chair and drinking beer, watching as Roar whisked egg and milk, fried bacon, seasoned and chopped tomatoes and cucumber. She’d borrowed one of his shirts;it was the size of a maternity smock and she could pull her knees up under it.

– Have you heard anyone say your name in English? she said, interrupting his account of the trip to Bergen.

He moved the frying pan off the heat. – Sure, whenever I’ve been in England they’ve always got a big laugh out of calling me Shout.

– Rory’s good, Jennifer said. – Maybe that’s what I should call you. Or do you have a middle name?

He hesitated a moment. – Mihaly.

– Mihaly Horvath? That’s about as un-Norwegian as you can get.

He poked his head into the fridge and took out a few packets of ready-chopped cured meat. – Mihaly was my old man’s name. Roar was the best my mother could come up with. She didn’t want me getting bullied at school because people thought I was a gypsy kid or something.

– So your middle name never got used?

He began spooning scrambled egg on to a dish. – My old man sometimes called me Miska.

– That’s cute. I’ve been imaging this remote and very strict father. But he wasn’t?

Roar gave a slight smile. – He came to Norway when he was eighteen years old. His parents were vanished by the Stalinists. He didn’t know anyone here, had to start from scratch. With nothing but his own two hands and a will of steel, as my mother used to say when she wanted to boast about him.

Jennifer emptied her beer glass. – My two boys have got middle names too. I actually wanted to name the elder after my father, but for once my husband put his foot down. No child should have to start at Sørum primary school with a handle like Trym Donald.

– The wise person gives way, Roar grinned as he set the plates on the kitchen table. She still hadn’t been into his living room, and that was fine by her.

– What does Viken think? she wanted to know once he’d lit candles and seated himself opposite her.

– About you trying to take over the investigation?

She snorted.

– We should have picked up on the connection with the Ylva Richter case straight away, he conceded.

She drank more beer and tried to hide how much the admission pleased her, how pleasantly numb she felt, how good it was to sit here and have him serving an evening meal to her.

– Actually, I have a question for the pathologist.

– Don’t worry about intruding on her free time, she encouraged him. – That’s the way it is in this business. Always on the job.

– Could the damage done to Mailin Bjerke’s eyes have been inflicted with a corkscrew?

He looked at her without the trace of a smile on his face, but still it took her a couple of seconds to realise he was being serious. And in that same moment she realised it was a clever idea.

– We’ve considered different types of screws and implements, she said, thinking aloud. – With a screw it would be hard to generate enough force … A corkscrew is a distinct possibility. What gave you that idea?

– Something that occurred to me when I was looking through the documents relating to the Ylva Richter case. One of a number of links … We’ve got to do absolutely everything we can to keep this whole association secret for the time being. Not just on account of the investigation, you can imagine the sort of hell that would break loose for her family if the connection leaked out.

Jennifer had no difficulty with that.

– I managed to persuade Liss that the printout she found has nothing to do with what happened to Mailin, she said. – I don’t think she’ll make the connection. And Ylva Richter’s name wasn’t actually mentioned in that particular article.

– Let’s hope you’re right, said Roar. He wrinkled his brow. – We’ve sent pictures of some of those involved in the case over to Bergen, he revealed. – One of the officers we’re liaising with there has shown them to the parents.

– But no joy, I gather from your expression. Do you have anything at all that might point the finger at the man she was living with?

– Nothing so far. He’s never lived in Bergen, but of course he might have gone there on the odd occasion.

– And still Viljam Vogt-Nielsen is number one on Viken’s list?

Roar carried on chewing as he answered. – Viken is concerned that we don’t overlook the psychology behind the murder of Mailin Bjerke. This business of the eyes being lacerated is a message we have to try to interpret. And the sheer rage behind those blows to the head. It points to someone in a close personal relationship to his victim.

He swallowed his food down with half a glass of beer. – And why was her mobile phone sent in the post?

– Maybe someone out there wants to play some kind of game with you, Jennifer hazarded.

Roar made a face that showed he was sceptical about her idea. – It can’t be ruled out, but we’re more inclined to think it shows a perverted sense of concern for his victim. He’s killed her, but he doesn’t want her to lie and rot there.

The furrows in his brow deepened and suddenly looked like three seagulls in flight, one with a large wingspan, flanked by two smaller ones.

– Whatever, we must keep concentrating on those closest to her. Her partner, of course, but also the stepfather. We’re trying to get in touch with the biological father, too. Apparently he hasn’t seen his family in over twenty years. He lives in Canada, but no one knows his whereabouts at the moment.

Jennifer had no difficulty in recognising Viken’s thought processes in what Roar was saying. She’d heard the detective chief inspector talking often enough about signals and signatures and hidden messages in the way a crime had been committed. Her own view of psychological profiling was that it was an American fad. About as scientific as trying to follow a scent.

– The sense of smell is a pretty useful tool, she observed. – Especially for dogs. When Roar looked at her quizzically she added: – It isn’t necessarily successful each time Mr Viken gets going on the human psyche.

Roar piled more scrambled egg on to his bread. He didn’t answer.

– And talking about psychology, she went on, – what about Mailin Bjerke’s patients? She presumably had a very
close
relationship to them as well. And you’ve hinted that one of them may have threatened her.

Roar looked thoughtful. She guessed he was wondering whether he’d already told her too much. She had to smile at the thought of what Viken would have said if he knew that she was sitting in the kitchen of one of his trusted associates with nothing on but a man’s shirt. She remembered her panties were lying somewhere in the bedroom, or out in the hallway.

– One of the other members of the team is trying to find out about Mailin Bjerke’s patients over the past few years, said Roar as he pushed his plate away. – Not easy, because only a few of them are registered with the social services. As regards those who were involved in her research, we may be able to get help from her supervisor, Tormod Dahlstrøm.

– Was Dahlstrøm her supervisor? Jennifer was impressed. Even she had followed his television series on the psychological element involved in cultural conflicts.

She chewed the remains of the cold meat, still ravenously hungry, she noticed. – What about this Jim Harris? Liss is convinced he saw something. Maybe he was the one who threatened Mailin that time so that she was afraid to carry on the treatment. He seems a distinctly dubious character.

– We’re trying to get in touch with the guy, Roar told her. – Turns out it’s not that easy. We might have to put something out via the media.

– It’s got to be worth that at least. Mailin had an appointment with him at around the time she disappeared.

Roar shook his head. – We still can’t say for certain that she was anywhere near her office that day.

– Even though the car was parked outside? You know roughly when she left the cabin, and you’ve got the time on the parking ticket.

– She might have been in several other places. We don’t have either witness observations or an electronic trail.