Карин Фоссум - The Whisperer

‘Can you remember what Gunnhild said?’

‘She wanted to come and see me. With some food, bits and bobs, medicine. I said it didn’t suit.’

‘But you must have wanted an end to the situation? Did you not want it resolved, for someone else to take over?’

‘Yes. But it would have to be someone bigger and stronger than Gunnhild. If you see what I mean.’

His telephone was flashing again, two lines this time. Ragna tried to ask herself what she had really wanted, but was distracted by the red lights. She was overwhelmed by the fact that he gave her the time she needed, but she was starting to feel tired. She reminded herself that she was finally safe, the inspector was not an enemy. And she had plenty of time, this would only go one way, she wanted for nothing and they fed her like a goose for Christmas. Trays of food in and out, with a few friendly words.

‘The situation was already resolved,’ she whispered.

‘Is that what you thought?’

He made a quick note, then looked up again. It struck her that he rarely blinked, his eyes were big and open. She looked at the white notepad with blue-ink scribbles. And realised that if he wrote a message on one of the sheets, tore it off and folded it double, the note would be the same size as the ones she had received in her mailbox.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. It was resolved.’

‘You had solved the problem?’

She looked away and seemed to be sad.

‘I was at the end of the road. I wasn’t frightened of anything any more and I knew that I wouldn’t get any more messages.’

‘When you were brought in, you were in pretty bad shape,’ he said. ‘You were exhausted, dehydrated and confused. You hadn’t had anything to eat or drink.’

She looked at Frank over by the window, rested her eyes on him. It was just what a person needed to relax, to watch a sleeping dog and listen to the regular breathing. After a while, she found herself breathing in the same rhythm.

‘No, no food. It wasn’t important. It was so hard to move around, and impossible to make decisions. Getting up from the chair, walking all the way to the kitchen, opening the cupboard, taking out a glass, turning on the tap, drinking, it was all too much. Just thinking about all the things I would have to do to get there made me exhausted. It was all I could do to sit still in the chair without lifting a finger and concentrate on my breathing. And as long as I stayed like that, without moving, I didn’t need anything. I had my eyes closed for the greater part of the time. When I opened them, it was sometimes light and sometimes dark, and I realised that the days were passing.’

Sejer tore a sheet from the notepad. He glanced at the red flashing lights on his phone, put a hand to his short fringe, but not a hair moved.

She gingerly touched her own dry hair as though mirroring him. It crossed her mind that she would be grey, like the inspector, in the course of a few years. She would turn grey while she served her sentence. It would be more flattering than faded red, it would give her character. She had never had character. She had had her father, but he was dead. She had had a son, but he had left.

‘Do you think you’ll remember me?’ she said in a tiny voice. ‘When all this is over, and someone else is sitting in this chair.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘What will you remember, do you think? Tell me.’

She was like a child begging for sweeties.

‘Your voice,’ he said and smiled. ‘No one else I know expresses themselves the way you do. I’m not used to people in this room, or building for that matter, talking to me the way you do. There’s something special about you, Ragna. Of course I will remember you. For the rest of my life, no doubt.’

‘That’s what Walther said, as well,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why I let him carry me to the bed. Ugly girls don’t get many chances.’

Gunnhild used a knife to cut the tape and open the lid of the thick, brown cardboard box. Inside were bags of Sloggi briefs, in packs of ten.

‘Do you remember the old Direct mail-order catalogues?’ she asked. ‘That used to come with the post?’

‘I remember them,’ Ragna whispered. ‘My mother and I used to sit on the sofa and look at them together. It wasn’t every exciting for a little girl, mostly kitchen equipment and things like that, but I liked looking at the pictures. And they had a lucky dip, do you remember that? The surprise package?’

Gunnhild did.

‘It cost four hundred and fifty kroner,’ Ragna remembered, ‘but the catalogues said it was worth nearly a thousand. I begged and begged for months to get a lucky dip. My mother told me it was probably just full of junk, the things they never managed to sell that took up space in the warehouse. But I got what I wanted in the end. And I’ve never been so disappointed in my life.’

‘What was in it?’ Gunnhild asked, and laughed.

‘Clothes hangers, a shoehorn, cotton reels. Different-coloured combs, pens, folders and rubber bands. One of those see-through rain ponchos. And a torch that shone in different colours. Red and green and yellow.’

‘I remember those torches,’ Gunnhild said.

‘There was also a necklace with several strings of plastic beads. I wore that necklace every day, I had to show my mother that it had been worth it. But the necklace soon broke, and I spent hours on my knees picking up beads.’

Ragna stared at the cardboard box.

‘Now we get surprise packages every day.’

Ragna put the packs of briefs in a trolley and went out into the shop. They already had a barcode on them. A man was standing further down the aisle, stretching up to look at something on the top shelf. She recognised the black suit and the slicked-back dark hair. From a distance, he looked thinner and smaller than last time, when he stood in front of her at the till. It was the Agent. With his black shoes and fastidious appearance, which had made her assume he worked for the Secret Service, or perhaps a funeral home. He pulled a shopping trolley on wheels behind him. He did not notice that she was staring at him, he was not sensitive to it, because he had no enemies, Ragna guessed, he had nothing to fear. There were people like that. It was not what he was looking for, so he moved on. His suit made him conspicuous. She passed him and carried on down the aisle, and then when she was some way from him, turned and looked at him again. He had an energy about him, a nervous edge, which she did not think was compatible with working as an undertaker. He was so quick, light on his feet, obviously on his way somewhere. Perhaps he was an estate agent after all, they often dressed like that. He eventually did take something from the shelves, a packet of four suet balls, the ones in green plastic netting. So he fed the birds, she liked that. She had the same kind outside her kitchen window. And it was winter, so people often remembered to do things like that. She stayed as close as she could to him, without making it obvious, and without knowing why. There were lots of other customers in the shop she could observe. But she liked following him up and down the aisles. Keeping him under surveillance.

When her shift was finished, she took some Sloggi briefs with her and asked Gunnhild to make a note. Audun got to her seat on the bus first and sat there tapping away on his mobile phone. After a while, he stopped and started to read a book. Maybe Lars had managed to convince him and he was studying to take the forklift truck licence.

She chose a seat five rows back on the right-hand side. She looked out at the shops and parks. A kindergarten with an old fishing boat outside in the playground jogged a memory. There had also been a boat at her son’s nursery that he liked to play in. Or perhaps it was more true to say that he felt protected in the small cabin. He had always been a child who liked to hide, to creep into confined spaces. Aboard the boat, he was at the helm. Suddenly she thought she saw his little face in the round cabin window, as pale and frightened as she was. After the kindergarten, the bus passed a football pitch and a shop that sold things for horses and dogs. Then lots of single-storey wooden houses, from the sixties, painted in pink and yellow and blue. She had seen everything before, day in and day out for years, because she always followed the same pattern. The pattern was imprinted like a map in her brain, and when she stuck to it, she felt safe.