Карин Фоссум - The Whisperer

‘Confused? Who said that?’

‘The people we’ve spoken to. Baris said that you were standing in the road, in the freezing cold, with practically nothing on. Your neighbour has seen you poking around in your dustbin on several occasions, and carrying the rubbish back into the house. People have also seen you wandering up and down your drive, down to the road and back again in a very agitated fashion.’

‘But I’ve explained all that!’ she whispered. ‘I was trying to lose count of the number of steps. So I could regain control.’

‘You were confused, Ragna. What came first? The confusion or the threats? Think about it for moment.’

‘I am not ill,’ she said flatly. She started to cry, without a sound, and did not wipe the tears away, just let them fall.

‘It’s not up to me to judge how ill you are,’ Sejer said. ‘Someone else will do that. But if that is the case, it would explain everything that has happened. And it’s an explanation that the court will believe, so the outcome will be different, and far better for you than prison. You will serve your sentence on different terms, you will be treated in a different way, and you will probably be released much earlier. That is why I am telling you all this, because I want the best for you. Because I want you to be somewhere where you won’t be judged, where you will be treated with care and understanding.’

It seemed that she had suddenly thought of something, a memory she could use.

‘You’ve got security cameras here. By the main entrance. And in reception.’

There was no change in Sejer’s expression when she said this.

‘We have looked at all the recordings,’ he said. ‘We have gone through them several times.’

‘Then you know that I was here, and you’ve seen the documents.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We have not seen the documents.’

He turned his laptop so the screen was facing her.

‘You can see the recordings for yourself. Would you like to?’

She nodded, but had no idea where it would lead. When an image of the entrance to the police station appeared on the screen, she leaned forward in anticipation. There were the wide glass doors, there was the paved area in front, the sign on the wall, the symbol of a standing lion bearing an axe. But no movement, not a person in sight. Everything was filmed from above, she was looking down on everything, just as the camera had looked down on her. Then a figure appeared.

‘There!’ She pointed triumphantly. ‘I’m waving as well, do you see?’

Sejer remained silent. He was not looking at the screen, he was looking at her.

‘Now I’m inside,’ she whispered. ‘Can you see that I’m inside, at reception?’

She saw herself, standing in the middle of the floor, bewildered, clutching her handbag. She was wearing only a pair of leggings and a thin, short-sleeved blouse.

‘Tell me what you see,’ Sejer said.

‘I’m not wearing very much,’ she admitted. ‘But I left the house in a rush, so it’s not surprising that I’m a bit stressed.’

She watched the screen closely. The woman moved to the right of the picture, towards some comfy chairs by the wall, where she sat down and put her bag on the chair beside her. She sat there for a long time. With her hands in her lap and staring at the door into the duty officer’s room. There was something helpless about the poor woman, she could see that clearly herself. Was that really what she looked like, so wretched and timid? Was that how other people saw her? The minutes passed. She glanced at the digits in the bottom right-hand corner, two, three, four minutes. The woman stretched out her hand and picked up one of the leaflets from a pile on the table. For a while she sat reading the brochure, looking up every so often.

‘What was the leaflet about, Ragna?’ Sejer asked. ‘Can you remember?’

She thought about it and looked at the screen again.

‘I think it was about love.’

He nodded.

‘What did it say about love, Ragna?’

She struggled to dredge up the memory.

‘Something about violence.’

‘That’s right,’ Sejer said. ‘Real love is free of violence. You were reading a leaflet from the Women’s Shelter.’

‘But I’m about to go in and talk to the duty officer now,’ she whispered eagerly. ‘I had forgotten how nervous I was, I had forgotten that I sat there for so long drumming up courage.’

As soon as the figure stood up, she was fully alert. She was going to file a report now and hand in the message as evidence. But then she realised that the only thing she had in her hand was the leaflet she had been reading from the Women’s Shelter. She crossed the reception area and went in through the glass door to the duty officer, where another camera started to film her, from another angle. Without saying anything, she put the leaflet down on the counter. Real love is free from violence. Then she gave the officer a firm nod and walked out.

The camera on the outside wall caught her as she left the building. She walked towards the semicircle of stone blocks, then started to walk faster and eventually ran down the street to Irfan’s taxi. The screen went black. Sejer struggled to find the right words in the silence that followed. She had lowered her head, did not want to look him in the eye. Her hands were in her lap. Her narrow shoulders sank in resignation, and even though he could not see her face, he was sure that she was flushed with shame.

‘It must have been the skulls from Malaysia that started everything,’ she whispered. ‘The ones that Lars wheeled out into the shop. I put batteries in one of them and the eyes lit up. It was as though they were looking at me, as though they wanted to tell me something.’

‘What did they want to tell you?’

‘That I was going to die.’

She was sailing on the ocean. The boat was no bigger than the little paddling pool that Rikard Josef had when he was small, and the sail was the size of a tablecloth. There was a mild breeze blowing. She saw no other boats, no people, no masts. She was not concerned about her direction or position as she bobbed peacefully towards the horizon where the sun was shining gold. But she never got there, the sun changed colour to peach then pink and red. The light started to fade. The night fell and it got colder. In the dark, she heard the seagulls that would no doubt eat her if she drifted for too long. And when they had pecked her to pieces, the lack of beauty she had always lived with would no longer be a problem. She had been told that they went for your eyes first. But then daylight came again, and she saw some mountains in the distance, great blue and purple mountains. The little boat drifted in the right direction and she sat on her knees with a hand shadowing her eyes. Soon she saw the cliffs and the white surf. The rocks were so sharp and jagged that the little boat would be torn to shreds. She closed her eyes and prepared herself for the impact, raising her arms for protection. She curled up in the bottom of the boat and waited.

She had been asleep for a hundred years or more, or so it felt. She had been to another country, another continent, another dimension, a world she could not enter or leave as she pleased, it was just there. The medicine she had been prescribed, once the experts had confirmed that she had lost her mind, and the doctors had concluded she was suffering from a hereditary mental illness, was the same that her father had taken all those years ago. There were a number of unpleasant side effects that she recognised from her father’s complaints — he had often refused to take the pills, to her mother’s despair. Her mouth was so dry that it was sometimes hard to make herself understood. Her head was full of cotton wool, and not much else. When she moved it was as though she was stuck, as though something was pulling her back. Her peripheral vision was reduced, but she could see clearly straight ahead. And when she tried to free her thoughts, when she needed to escape, she could not find the white beaches, or deep green forests. She struggled to link her mind with words and images, and was quickly exhausted. Too often, she gave up and sat in a shapeless fog.