Карин Фоссум - The Whisperer

‘Don’t drink alcohol when you’re taking Apodorm,’ he instructed.

‘Why not? What happens then?’

‘It will wipe you out completely.’

‘That’s what I want,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m sitting here.’

There was a long silence.

‘You’re trying to escape from something,’ he said.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Ragna retorted.

‘No,’ he replied firmly.

Then he said no more. She stood up to demonstrate she had nothing on her mind.

‘Just call me, if there’s anything,’ he said.

He stood up as well, albeit with great difficulty. Put his hands on the armrests and pushed himself up. This simple movement left him breathless. The look he gave her as she left reminded her of the look in William’s eyes.

She went to the chemist to get the pills, then took the bus home. Opened the mailbox, but it was empty. Suddenly she was furious that there was nothing there. She panicked when there was a letter there, and felt very uncertain when there was not. As soon as she got through the door, she looked up at the electric wire that was connected to the doorbell. It came out of a hole in the wall, ran along the coving and then disappeared into the wall again. But so did the wire for the outside light, so she had to get it right. She wanted to keep the outside light at all costs, so the Rottweiler was as visible as possible next to the door. Full of purpose, she marched into the kitchen and found a sharp knife, before going down into the cellar and switching off the main fuse. She pushed a stool in to the wall, climbed up, hesitated, got down and opened the door, studied the bell. And the outside light. Went in again and stepped up onto the stool. One wire was thinner than the other, and as far she could work out, she had to cut the thinner one. She cut through the wire, with her teeth clenched and her heart in her throat. She went down into the cellar to turn on the main fuse and then looked out the front door. She had light. But no sound. She was glad when she knew for certain that the connection had been cut forever. For the fun of it, she put her finger on the bell again and again, and was childishly delighted when there was no shrill ring. He would have to knock instead now. Until his knuckles were bleeding. No one else came to see her anyway, so if someone knocked, it was him. Her stalker. After locking the door and fastening the security chain, she returned to the kitchen and opened the packet of Apodorm. She read the instructions several times. Naper had given her a hypnotic drug. She liked the sound of that. The list of possible side effects made her smile; they were almost endless. Dizziness. Headaches. Nightmares. Memory loss. Aggression and confusion. Breathlessness. And then, of all things, drowsiness. Fancy that, she had been given sleeping pills that might make her drowsy! She would have howled with laughter if she could.

Whenever she moved around in the house, she glancedthrough the window down to the road, in case anyone was standing there staring. There was a constant battle going on inside her: it’s over now, she thought; then, of course he’s not going to stop. No doubt he was planning the next move. What did he want from her? Did he want her to run out of the house and attract attention with her confused behaviour? She had tried. She had called the police. No one had come.

She went into the bathroom and put the packet of sleeping pills on the shelf under the mirror. Apodorm. Dormero. There was a connection. If only it was night, then she would crawl into a cave where no one could find her. The doorbell was broken. She had chemical protection and a snarling dog.

She closed the red curtains and turned off the light. When she was lying under the duvet and had swallowedtwo pills instead of the one recommended on the packet, she wondered about Rikard Josef and what could have happened. When the chemicals lulled her to sleep, she dreamt about him. It started with a strange dragging sound across the floor. She could not understand what it was, could not imagine what kind of creature would move like that. She wanted to sit up and have a look, but once again had problems moving — her arms were heavy, as were her legs and head. She could feel a band tightening around her forehead, a ring of steel. But eventually she managed to haul herself up halfway and rested on her elbow. She saw her son on the floor, tried to whisper his name, but nothing came out. He edged closer awkwardly. He had lost a leg, and was holding himself up with crutches, the kind they had during the war. They were made of wood, with thick cushions under his arms. He was moving his mouth as well, but she heard nothing, and she realised that he had the same affliction as her. He did not have a voice. So he had nothing to say to her, and she could not ask where he had gone. Then he dissolved into the dark. But she heard his crutches all night long. They thumped on the floor like two sticks. She heard the one foot he still had, the heavy tread of a hard boot; she heard his effort, his struggle, his exhaustion, his breathing. He was restless like her. When she woke after a long night, she was heavy and exhausted, just as Naper had said she would be. She felt unsteady and shaken, as though she had been knocked over. The band across her forehead was still there, and still quite tight. She remembered the dream. She was certain that something terrible had happened to her son, and she could not help him. She threw the duvet to one side and got out of bed, was scared she might tumble, used the bedside table to support herself, and then the wall. She hoped that her stalker had come to the door, and had left again when the doorbell made no sound. The pressure across her forehead persisted. But when it finally eased, she felt rested.

‘Daddy always went to bed first,’ Ragna explained, ‘and early, as a rule. In summer he would go to bed when it was still light, without even closing the curtains. If the sun wanted to shine on him, he took it as a sign. He would be showered in gold, he believed, and if he could then gather enough sun energy, he would also be able to shine on others. The lights in the bedroom were always on, in both summer and winter. The ceiling light, the reading light above the bed and the lamp on the bedside table. It has a red shade, like a toadstool. I still have it. Daddy always lay next to the wall. My mother would go to bed a couple of hours later and always wore an eye mask. The bulb in the ceiling light was sixty watts, the one in the reading light, and the one in the toadstool were both twenty-five. Like an interrogation room.’

She smiled at the inspector.

‘Daddy would often lie and knock on the wall,’ she whispered, ‘with his knuckles. As though he were sending secret messages to the room next door, which was my room, and later Rikard’s room. My bed was next to the wall, which was no more than cardboard between us. In the evenings I lay awake and listened, there was something he wanted to tell me, and he obviously thought I could understand his secret code. That only he and I understood. He would knock lightly with long pauses in between, or he would knock hard and fast in a set rhythm, or without any rhythm at all. Sometimes he found a pattern that he would repeat over and over. And even though I understood nothing, Daddy’s tapping on the wall was an important sign. It meant that I was part of a pact, one of the chosen few. We had our own language. Daddy was trying to teach me the language, that was what we were doing every night. As time passed, I started to know some of the signals that he repeated and was able to answer back. Some were very short, others consisted of several phrases. But every time I learned a pattern, he found another. I spent a lot of time awake, befuddled by all the knocking and what it might mean. I so wanted Daddy and me to have our own special language that no one else understood. Sometimes when I was bored at school, I would sit tapping gently on the desk to see if anyone reacted. If someone else knew the special code, if someone would look up and send me a nod of acknowledgement, a sign that he belonged to the secret pact. You know what a lively imagination children can have. But no one did.’