Карин Фоссум - The Whisperer

She wept silently. Tears of both sorrow and joy. How lonely and bewildered he must have been as a child. She folded her hands, but she did not pray. She walked happily round the cell, to the window and back, unable to sit still. When Sejer paid an unexpected visit some hours later, he stood in front of her, solid as a pillar, almost two metres tall with silver-grey hair, and she was as bashful as a girl.

‘Did you read it?’ she whispered, breathless. ‘The letter from Rikard?’ She put a hand to her chest where the envelope was hidden.

‘Yes, I read it,’ he said.

She could see that he was slightly embarrassed too. Ragna suddenly realised that he was not in his office and therefore not in the role of interviewer. He was not going to cross-examine her any more, pressure her, question everything she said. Not that he had ever really done that. But now he was as a guest in her domain, and he behaved as a guest should.

‘I don’t know where I’ll end up,’ she told him. ‘But I will never forget you.’

‘I certainly hope not,’ he said.

‘I take my medication now, three times a day. My head feels so confined, but what happens from now on is reality.’

‘Reality is not the worst that can happen to a person,’ Sejer assured her. There were certain things that could be documented, that was all. He did not have much more to say. He had wanted to show her sympathy, to show that he knew what was going on in her life, and that he understood only too well what her son’s acceptance meant to her. He bowed and made to leave, but then stopped in the doorway.

‘I won’t forget you either. Meeting people like you makes my job worthwhile. People who have something to give.’

She was so bowled over that she blushed furiously, as she often did. She could not imagine what he felt he had got; she had given him nothing, only some tangled thoughts. But he obviously appreciated them, she could see that.

The heavy metal door did not slam as normal, as he closed it gently behind him. All she heard was the small click, and in that way, he showed her his respect. And then his footsteps disappeared down the corridor. He walked slowly. A man who had his own steady rhythm, who could not be pushed or thrown off balance. Like granite, Ragna thought. Shortly after, the doors started to slam again, one after the other in quick succession. It made her think of gunfire, but she knew it was the food trolleys making their way down the corridor. She heard the hatch open, the little click. Then Adde came into the cell and put a tray down on her desk. She gave him a friendly look, and smiled at both the glass eye and the healthy eye. There was a small card on the tray with a number, the number of her cell, 706. There was a jug of water, a bowl of fresh salad and plate of something that looked like tortilla wraps.

She decided that she actually liked this officer. Today she could afford to, she felt generous and she would not have much more to do with him anyway. She would soon be in psychiatric care and, perhaps, could go for walks in a beautiful garden under leafy trees. There might even be a pond with water lilies, and there would be a small bridge over the pond, where she would walk with her son. Adde went out. She took a bite of the tortilla and chewed it well. The food was surprisingly good, much better than normal, and so spicy that tears sprang to her eyes, and her head heated up and her nose started to run, and she laughed as though she were drunk. Goodness, she had never tasted anything like it. She drank some water, it was cold and refreshing. The second tortilla was a disappointment, dry, tough and tasteless, not like the first. She took another bite and felt something strange in her mouth, something like sausage skin, which the cook must have forgotten to remove. She pulled it out of her mouth and opened the wrap to remove whatever was left. Inside was a folded sheet of paper. It was damp and limp and yet so recognisable. Someone had sent her a message. In here, behind the walls, in her cell.

The shame flared up so fast that it took her breath away. The spices made her burn and the humiliation made her burn and her heart was racing. How naive could she be, how incredibly stupid, to believe that it was finally over, that whoever it was who had been after her all autumn had given up. She had not been so naive since that night with Walther. But then she remembered that her pursuer did not exist, and she sat for a while with her face in her hands, as she battled with her conflicting thoughts. She held the soggy piece of paper up in front of her eyes. She could not understand what he wanted from her, what kind of threat he had written in his usual, evil way, but she could see the big letters through the paper.

She got up and paced around the cell with the message in her hand. This time, she would show them once and for all who knew the truth. But then she was floored by uncertainty again. She wanted to read it, but resisted at the same time. If she read the message, it would be real, and it would be the same as letting him in, just as she had throughout the autumn. Time and again, she had read those messages, time and again she had allowed herself to be destroyed. No, she would close the door on that forever. She scrunched up the message into a greasy, soggy ball. She wanted to throw it away, but did not know where. There was no toilet in the cell, otherwise she could have flushed it down the drain. She only had a bucket with a lid, but she might be tempted to pick it out and read it. No one must see the message. She had chosen which side she was on — she had abandoned her illness, and was now somewhere in between, caught in a clamp. She carefully opened the paper ball, ripped it into tiny pieces and put them in her mouth one by one. Chewed, swallowed, drank some water, chewed, swallowed, drank some water. I am swallowing it all, she thought, my illness, everything. I will pretend this is not happening! After a while it became hard to swallow. The pieces of paper were lying in her stomach like a thick mass of porridge, and it was swelling. She drank more water. It was so hard to breathe, but soon her stomach acid would dissolve the mass and it would disappear forever. The acid would erase every word.

She sat slumped at her desk for a long time. After a while she heard the doors slamming again, and knew that they were coming to collect the tray. Or did they have another errand, and who was going to come? She stood up, hiding the metal fork behind her back, and stared at the door that was about to open.

Adde came in.

‘Wow!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve drunk a litre of water. Some of the others complained too,’ he laughed. ‘Some people couldn’t even eat it, it was so spicy.’

Ragna stood there staring. He stood with his legs apart, like her. Then he walked over to the desk and picked up the tray, not noticing that anything was missing.

‘New man in the kitchen,’ he explained. ‘That’s what happens when a taxi driver from Turkey gets a job as a prison chef.’

‘Taxi driver?’ she whispered, terrified. ‘Turkey?’

There was something about his eyes. They both seemed to be dead and glassy now, she thought. He had never seen or heard her, no one did. She only had herself. And the fork.

‘Your eyes are watering,’ Adde said. ‘It must have been spicy.’

Ragna felt the paper ball growing again, becoming heavier and heavier until it filled her belly. It pressed against her lungs and tried to force its way up her throat, wanting to spew out of her mouth for the whole world to see. She touched the prongs of the fork with her fingertips. They were sharp.

As Adde walked towards the door, Ragna started to make strange sounds, as if she was trying to cough something up, or was crying, or perhaps even laughing. He turned round but could not understand what was going on or what the strange expression on her face meant. He had heard the stories about Ragna Riegel, but never noticed anything.