The Last Pilgrim (42 page)

Bergmann looked at the clock in the police car. He still had time to stop by Kolstadgata.

He had to find Vera Holt.

CHAPTER 46

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Kolstadgata 7

Oslo, Norway

Kolstadgata 7 was the closest one could come to rock bottom in one of the world’s richest countries. Bergmann had been there countless times before, when he patrolled the area by car many years ago, but he couldn’t recall it ever looking worse than it did today. Outside the main entrance some Somali kids were playing with a couple of garbage bags. There was garbage everywhere, and he could hear kids fighting in the playground on the other side of the building.

The elevator wasn’t working. Bergmann suspected that it hadn’t worked since the last time he had been there. He slowly climbed up to the sixth floor, studying the tagging on the walls. On the third floor the smell of piss was even stronger than he recalled from the old days.

He pounded hard on a door that had a strip of duct tape stuck to it. The name Holt had been scratched on the tape with a ballpoint pen that had no ink.

The stairwell door slammed, and a Somali woman came down the hallway with three kids in tow. She gave Bergmann a quick once-over before averting her gaze back to the hall. The biggest of the kids gave him a look that said he could tell from a mile away that he was a cop. The smallest boy turned his head and stared at him. The mother pulled him along and said something unintelligible in a high voice.

He banged on the door again.

“Vera Holt?” he said loudly, leaning close to the doorjamb, which was splintered from what looked like several attempted break-ins.

He waited a moment, then looked at his watch.
Damn,
he thought.
I have to get to the airport soon.
He turned around and looked down the row of doors on the other side of the hall. Finally he took a step toward the door across from Vera Holt’s apartment.

The peephole in the door was black. Somebody in there must have been watching him the whole time.

As he took another step toward the door, it opened hesitantly until the safety chain wouldn’t go any farther.

“Whaddaya want?”

Bergmann held up his police ID, which hung from a cord around his neck.

“I’d like to talk to Vera Holt.”

The door closed. He could hear someone fiddling with the chain.

The woman’s face revealed she’d had a hard life. Bergmann could see the marks of alcoholism in her numerous wrinkles. She pulled her robe tighter. A roll-your-own cigarette hung from her lips. Her toes were sticking out of a pair of old orthopedic sandals.

She picked at her tongue and studied her fingers. The TV was blaring. An excitable American woman was touting the excellence of some ab-training device.

“She’s been locked up again; they came and got her on Sunday. Lay there screaming all day, so finally I called the medics.”

“Where’d they take her?” Bergmann asked.

“I don’t know where they take people like that. It’s unbelievable that they let her live here, really. Everybody’s afraid of her. I know this place is a dump, but I don’t want a neighbor sticking a knife in my back.”

“What do you mean?” Bergmann said and thought,
Knife in my back.

“When she moved in about ten years ago, a friend of mine said she’d killed her stepfather with a knife years ago.”

Bergmann felt a chill.

Everything came crashing down inside his head in a second. The asterisk in the agency records. The profile of the perp. Acute psychosis.

Vera Holt had apparently killed before, and, if his theory was correct, she had a motive for killing Krogh. Had Vera killed Krogh to avenge her father? Because she’d found out that Krogh had murdered him? But how could she know that Krogh had ordered her father killed?

Bergmann ran down the stairs and out into the fresh air. As soon as he got in his car, he called Fredrik Reuter.

“I found Vera Holt.”

“Vera Holt?”

“Kaj Holt’s daughter is still alive. She’s in some hospital psych ward.”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Are you sure?” Reuter asked. “Do you really think she might be involved? Damn, that would be weird. I was thinking about it earlier today. We may have been on the wrong track. The shoe print we’ve got is an ECCO size forty-one. Most likely a man—”

“But it could just as well be a woman,” Bergmann said, finishing his sentence for him.

“Are you sure?” Reuter asked. “Do you think it’s her?”

“She has a motive, at least. If my theory is right.” He grabbed his notebook and feverishly leafed through it backward. Where had he gotten sidetracked? Bente Bull-Krogh might have delivered the killer right into his arms days ago.

“What is it?” said Reuter.

“A woman. Krogh’s wife thought it was a woman.” He found the page from his first interview with Bente, when they had sat out on the terrace in Bygdøy and he’d asked her if her father’d had an affair with another woman.

Bergmann studied his own handwriting for a few seconds.
Wife thought a woman had phoned Krogh. An affair? His mistress’s husband? Began in 1963, lasted for a few years. Father stopped going hunting.

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Reuter.

“One time, years ago, somebody phoned and didn’t say a word. Krogh’s wife thought it was a woman. It was in the fall. During hunting season.”

“Hunting for what?”

“Grouse.”

“September, then,” said Reuter.

“It was September when Agnes, Cecilia, and the maid were killed.”

“That was . . . what year was that?”

“1963,” Bergmann said. “It went on for a few years. Then Krogh stopped going grouse hunting.”

“How old was Vera Holt in 1963?”

“Eighteen,” said Bergmann.

“My God. Do you really think it could be Vera Holt?”

“You’ll have to get her prints. And find her record.”

“Record?”

“According to her neighbor, Vera murdered her stepfather with a knife when she was young. Kaj Holt’s wife must have remarried, and then Vera eventually killed the man. There’s an asterisk in the agency records, which means there’s a file on her in the stored archives. It must be the old murder case.”

Bergmann could imagine Reuter’s chin dropping to his shirt collar.

“Do you realize what you’re saying?” said Reuter. “Krogh was murdered with a knife.”

“Find her.”

“You’re going to have to skip Berlin,” Reuter said. “Vera Holt may have killed Krogh. You understand what I’m telling you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not going to Berlin. Do you hear me, Tommy? You have to come down here right away.”

Bergmann turned on the blue light on the car’s roof and moved into the left lane. He was going almost a hundred miles an hour.

“No,” he said. “I can’t skip Berlin.”

“You can’t? Why not?”

“If Vera Holt was admitted to the acute psych ward, she won’t get out for at least a week,” Bergmann said.

He heard Reuter sigh in resignation.

Bergmann flicked on the siren to warn a hapless driver who hadn’t noticed he was coming up fast, much too fast. He could almost feel the heat from the disc brakes as he reluctantly slowed down. At last the car in front pulled over and let him pass.

“There’s just one thing that I haven’t figured out,” Bergmann said. “How would Vera Holt know who ordered her father killed?”

“How about Peter Waldhorst?” Reuter suggested.

CHAPTER 47

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Hotel InterContinental

Budapester Strasse

Berlin, Germany

An intense whistling sound slowly roused Tommy Bergmann from sleep.

He recognized the sound of a truck backing down the street. He pulled up the covers and turned over to escape the strip of light coming through the curtains. When the truck stopped backing up and the soothing hum of Budapester Strasse had returned, his cell phone started ringing on the nightstand. Bergmann swore and reached for the clock. Already ten. He must have slept through his alarm. Or he’d never set it. Images from the night before flickered through his mind. He’d taken a walk along Kurfürstendamm, seen the famous ruined church, and bought some beer at a kiosk. He hadn’t wanted to see anyone, and had fallen asleep with his clothes on.

Bergmann studied the display on his cell phone closely. Hadja had called him the night before, but he hadn’t picked up. He didn’t know what to say to her. She might be just what he needed, but he was afraid of hurting her, of pulling her down with him, the way he’d almost done with Hege. He let the phone ring and go to voice mail, and waited for Fredrik Reuter to call again. It only took a few seconds. All of a sudden Bergmann remembered his dream from last night, a terrifying, inhuman dream that haunted him several times a year.

“And how are we doing today?” Reuter asked.

Bergmann didn’t feel like replying.

“Have you found Vera Holt?” he said, his head still half under the big pillow.

“Ullevål. The acute psychiatric ward is quite nice. Not that I’d want to end up there, but . . .”

“And?”

“And she’s not in any condition to be interviewed. According to the doctor she’s working her way out of a psychosis.”

“And the search?”

“We’ll have a warrant by tomorrow morning. Maybe even this afternoon, if we’re lucky.”

“What day of the week did Our Lord create lawyers?” Bergmann asked.

“Democracy is never perfect, isn’t that how the saying goes?” Reuter said.

Oh, shut up,
Bergmann thought. The hotel room was full of the sort of ambient background noise that only a city the size of Berlin could produce. His gaze wandered around the room and ended up on the rotating TV, which was folded into the wall by the bathtub, making it possible to watch TV from the tub behind Plexiglas.

“Don’t go into the apartment without me,” Bergmann said. “Wait till I get there.”

“Okay. But we might have her, Tommy. I’ve got her file in front of me right now.”

Bergmann felt his pulse quicken.

“She was fourteen when she killed her stepfather.”

Bergmann didn’t say a word, but flipped open the top of a twenty-pack of Prince cigarettes from the duty-free store. He hardly recognized himself in the mirror. His hair was greasy and unwashed, and his eyes had dark smudges underneath.

“On the night of Advent Sunday, November 29, 1959, Vera Holt murdered her stepfather with nine stab wounds in an apartment on Normannsgate. A patrol apprehended her on the steps of Kampen Church. Vera was sitting there with a bloody kitchen knife in her hand, wearing only her nightgown.”

Bergmann lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. He thought about Vera Holt, a mere girl, in her nightgown, barefoot, with a kitchen knife in her hand.
What god had created that life?
he wondered.

“She was judged to be temporarily insane at the time of the murder and not criminally responsible, though she easily could have landed in Bredtveit women’s prison at the age of fourteen.”

“So what happened?”

“She was at Dikemark psychiatric hospital for a few years.”

“A few years?”

“Good behavior, was declared cured, or so they said.”

“When?”

“1963.”

“1963,” Bergmann repeated, stubbing out his cigarette before heading into the bathroom.

“This could be our woman, Tommy.”

“Wasn’t she given a clean bill of health?”

“If a person is psychotic . . . you know this, Tommy. Think how many of them you’ve brought in—driven to the emergency room yourself—and then run into them again in the same condition a few months later.”

“Don’t touch the apartment,” Bergmann said.

The shower felt like a small cleansing. As soon as he got out, the sound of the TV—a German news program—reminded him what awaited him.

The Turkish cab driver drove slowly up Kurfürstendamm. Bergmann sat with his arm halfway out the window, enjoying a gentle breeze on his bare skin. He’d never been to Berlin before, but he liked it—the old apartment buildings with their central courtyards, the endless green-edged boulevards. Though he had no real basis for his opinion, it seemed as if the city had shaken off the indignities of the war. In all the pictures he’d seen of Berlin over the years, it had looked dilapidated and half in ruins. Now something new and unprecedented seemed to be rising from the ashes. He felt a pang of fear at the thought that the Germans might one day rise again.

Forget it,
he thought as the cab stopped at a traffic light by the department store KaDeWe. He glanced at the clothes he had on and thought that maybe he ought to look a bit more presentable when he met with Waldhorst. A former German officer probably wouldn’t have much respect for a long-haired Norwegian policeman dressed in worn jeans and a pair of deck shoes that had seen better days. He touched the new light-blue shirt he’d purchased at Oslo Airport the day before and decided it was businesslike enough. He shook his head in resignation—he usually didn’t think like this. He was nervous about what Peter Waldhorst would have to say. He leaned back in his seat, noting the smell of new leather coming from the neck rest. An old German cabaret song issued softly from the loudspeaker in the door. Bergmann squinted at the sunshine and the dappled light coming through the trees.