Карин Фоссум - The Whisperer

And still no more messages in the mailbox. So she had been a random victim, after all, and now he had gone elsewhere. He was prowling up and down some other road, hunched up in the dark, somewhere else. His short messages had unnerved others, made more and more people feel unsafe. She was sure that he only targeted women, those who lived alone. It probably gave him an extra thrill. She sat in front of the computer for a long time that evening. YouTube was her window to the world, there were lots of things that made her laugh, amazed her and terrified her. Funny films of people and animals, or surprising things, and things she did not understand — like the short video called ‘The Jumper’ where a man commits suicide by jumping from the roof of a tower block. She could no longer remember how she found it, or what she was looking for, only that it was suddenly there, lasted sixty seconds and took her breath away. The jumper was filmed from below, at street level, with a handheld camera, and the cameraman followed what happened moment by moment. The man paced back and forth to begin with, then positioned himself at the edge of the roof. A taut figure, dressed in black. He stood there for a few seconds, frozen like a statue, before spreading out his arms like wings. The camera zoomed in, but his face was not clear, only his body, and what he was wearing. There were no street sounds, no cars, no shouts. Then the black figure fell slowly forward in an elegant arc, crashing to the ground with terrific speed. There was a sickening, hard sound as he hit the pavement, like a heavy animal carcass. He landed on his front with one arm underneath him, the other out to the side. Blood immediately started to pour from his ears and mouth. Then there was the sound of running feet and shallow breathing. It was the cameraman running forward, to get a close-up. The lifeless body, face down. The blood. And silence, again, for a long time. Suddenly she saw a faint movement. First a hand, then an arm. Then the figure moved his head as well, very carefully to begin with, and with great effort, but he eventually managed to lift it, let it sink down, then lifted it again. And somehow, she had no idea how, he managed to get up onto his knees, and push himself up, slowly, until he was on his feet, staring straight into the camera. With a piercing look that Ragna had never experienced the like of before, as though, in some uncanny way, he knew everything that was worth knowing about her and the world and the people who live in it. Why they were in this world and where they would go after, as though he had just returned from the dead. Then he turned away from the camera, and walked calmly down the pavement, before disappearing round a corner.

The first time Ragna watched ‘The Jumper’, it had taken a while before she realised the film was manipulated. She was not always quick on the uptake. No one jumped from a ten-storey tower block and then stood up and walked away. Someone had had fun with the camera, someone who knew about film techniques, perhaps students from film school. And they had uploaded the result onto YouTube. She could not even begin to understand how they had done it, she knew nothing about that sort of thing. But she was hugely impressed, disconcerted almost, because it struck her how easy it was to fool people, to manipulate them, to get them to believe something, a belief that might make them do something political, for example. It was impossible to see where they had made cuts. Everything seemed to happen in one take. She studied the video again, her face close to the screen, with narrow, focused eyes. And once again she was fascinated. She thought that perhaps if she watched it lots of times she would discover the secret. Find the exact place where the film had been cut. Be certain that the figure falling from the roof was a heavy, black-clad doll. When she had had enough, she turned off the computer and looked down to the road. The light was still on in Irfan’s shop. Maybe he was sitting there looking at the light in her windows as well, as he stewed over the Norwegians and their lack of openness. Or perhaps he was dreaming about a top chef job with good pay. Perhaps his books did not balance and he could not face telling his family — he might still have parents in Turkey and he was supporting them, they were dependent on him. She thought about honour and shame and fury. They might drive a person to do anything.

Ragna Riegel was sleeping.

With her face turned towards the open window that let in the cool November air. The thousands of thoughts she had had in the day that had not developed into decisions or actions, or plans for the next day, or notes in a letter, exploded like shooting stars in her brain. Her dreams were full of flickering images that made no sense, and these then filled her with fear and unease, and very occasionally joy. Of course Rikard Josef had not deserted her. She still had him on her arm, he was warm and smelt sweet, like the goat’s milk soap they sold at Europris, and when she squeezed the black-and-white rubber cow, he laughed happily. But suddenly the Stasi were standing at the foot of her bed accusing her of betrayal, saying she had been weak and not taken her responsibility seriously. They had come to get her and put her in a museum. And then Irfan appeared in the doorway and he was raging, standing there in a bloody doctor’s coat with a scalpel in his hand. He wanted her to think differently about things. Get into her mind. Cut important connections, so she could no longer understand what was going on, to prevent her thoughts from linking up to become realisations and conclusions. She rose and fell through all the different layers, was light as a feather and huge as a whale, a stone one moment or a bubble the next, and she could talk again, she could scream and everyone heard her, and cowered in fear.

‘I’ve been thinking about those boys on the railway bridge,’ Sejer said.

The idea that the inspector had sat in his living room thinking about her and the things she had told him pleased Ragna. He had taken her home with him, did not flick her on and off like a switch; her words and stories followed him through the day and maybe even into his sleep.

She wanted to be with him in his sleep.

‘In the old days, boys would lie down in between the tracks when a train was coming, as a dare,’ he explained. ‘Back then, the trains sat rather high on the tracks so there was plenty of room. And boys that age are thin and slender.’

Ragna’s jaw dropped in horror.

‘They lay there while the train went over them?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’ve heard. As I said, it was often a dare.’

‘All the same,’ Ragna whispered, ‘if the film ended like that, my brain still hasn’t stored it.’

‘Then another memory has taken up that space,’ he said. ‘Or something you heard outside. Whatever it is was more important than the boys.’

She could not think what that might be, but nodded all the same.

‘Tell me about something important that you’ve forgotten,’ she said. The way she had formulated her request made her smile. ‘That you feel you should have remembered.’

He picked up the pen again and sat fiddling with it for a while. He was constantly having to make decisions with regard to Ragna Riegel — how much he should give of himself; how much he should humour her, give her what she needed or wanted in order to push forwards. Or if he should restrict himself to building a minute-by-minute account of what had happened, writing it down and presenting it to the court. But he wanted to give her what she needed, he wanted to make this case something more than duty. Ragna was different in every way, the case was different from other cases. The connection between them was different. He was getting older. He did not have many years left in the high-backed chair from Kinnarps that he had bought himself. He wanted to have a sense of self-respect when he retired, to know that he had given everyone the opportunity to explain themselves in detail, that he had given them time, that he had listened with an openness, understanding and respect. He put the pen down again.