Dreamless (31 page)

Everything had ended here.

In an hour, one of his poor colleagues would be standing outside in the snow as Mona Gran’s boyfriend opened the door. And this colleague would know that his presence there was about to destroy the man’s life.

Singsaker stood up, feeling faint, and left the house. Out on the front steps, which were now covered with new snow, he again fell to his knees, without thinking about how vulnerable this made him to another attack from Røed.

He stayed there as he tapped in Brattberg’s number.


“He’s here. He’s out here in Heimdal, and he killed Mona.” That was all Singsaker managed to say.

It occurred to him that this was the first time he’d ever used only her first name.

Brattberg was shocked. She wanted Singsaker to tell her more. Wanted him to explain. He couldn’t just say that a colleague was dead without any other explanation.

He simply replied, “Come right away.”

Then he lay down, and everything inside him went black.

*   *   *

There was no police car parked outside. He’d had the ax in the garage, and it had felt natural to take it along.

The cracking sound it made as it struck the back of her head had sent him in unexpected directions. He’d gone back out to Julie, and when she’d seen the blood on his hands, she’d given him that half-dead look that he’d seen in Anna’s eyes and his mother’s. As if he were evil through and through. Then she’d closed her eyes and stopped shaking. How was he going to get her to sing for him now?

Then he went back and saw the policeman go inside. It was one of the two officers from his childhood. The one who had come out to Ringve and talked to him. The one who had almost seen through him. Now he watched the policeman from the crack in the bedroom door. The man knelt down, as if the dead policewoman were some sort of altar. Then he just stood up and left.

When the officer was gone, Røed cautiously entered the living room and pulled the ax out of the dead woman’s head, which made a sinister sucking sound. Then he paused, wondering whether he’d ever sleep again.

He wiped the blade of the ax on the sofa and left the room.

*   *   *

Singsaker rubbed snow on his face in an attempt to pull himself together. He was consumed with rage. He got up and stamped his feet. He wanted to go back to get the ax and look for Røed. Instead, he started pounding on the walls of the house with his bare fists. He hammered on the walls next to the front door. But this did more damage to his hand than to the house. His knuckles began to bleed, and drops of blood fell on the white snow. That was when he noticed it.

A trail of blood led away from the door and around the corner of the house. It wasn’t his blood. He switched on the flashlight on his cell phone and followed the trail. From the house it continued in an uneven line toward the yard behind the garage. At that point the thoughts he’d had during his icy swim came back to him. Something about the shoveled snow. There was something striking about the two heaps of snow that Røed had made at both houses.

Singsaker moved slowly now, trying not to make the slightest sound as he moved through the deep snow. When he reached the back of the snow heap, which was a good distance down the slope behind the garage, he saw it. An opening had been dug into it, and this opening led down a dark passageway. He leaned down to shine the light inside. That was when he heard the creak of the snow behind him. He turned abruptly and saw the ax coming toward him.

*   *   *

Julie Edvardsen blinked her eyes, exhausted. A short time ago she’d felt completely frozen as he dragged her over here from the car, pulling her by the hair. But that feeling had begun to fade. The cold was slowly losing its grip, to be replaced by an almost pleasant sensation of numbness, and with it an overwhelming urge to sleep. Again her eyes started to close.

But I mustn’t fall asleep
, she thought.
I mustn’t, because then he’ll take me. He’ll put the knife to my throat or he’ll kick me to death, the way he did with Bismarck.

All of a sudden she regretted not eating any of the food he’d brought her. It would have given her the strength to stay awake. Now her body temperature was dropping, and she was starving. But she had to fight back.

Then she heard sounds outside. Someone was walking through the snow.

He’s coming back, she thought. Now I have to sing for him. I have to sing or this time he’ll kill me. She tried to gather her strength. Tried to see if she had any energy left. When Julie was little, her mother had always liked telling her stories about people in crisis who discovered they had strength they never knew they possessed. But she didn’t know whether that was true of her; maybe it only happened in stories. Then she started thinking again.

Who am I? What am I fighting for?

Again she heard sounds outside.

Someone was fighting. She heard deep, grunting male voices and heavy breathing. Then suddenly a scream, from some violent pain. And a laugh.

She knew that laughter. It belonged to him. But somebody else was out there too. And that gave her hope.

The other, unknown person screamed again. Then she heard a sound that reminded her of when he’d kicked Bismarck in the basement. A gasp from the unknown man, and then silence. She shut her eyes and stayed still, listening. A lifeless body was dragged inside the snow cave next to her. She heard something being tied up, tight.

Still she refused to look.

Only when he had crawled back outside did she dare open her eyes.

She was staring at a lifeless shadow. It was too dark for her to get a good look at him, but she felt a strange closeness to this man who might have been trying to rescue them—her and the baby. And she thought that if she ended up dying in here, she was glad that at least she wasn’t alone.

Then he came back.

“So? Are you going to sing?” he asked, his voice strangely gentle as he pointed at her with something that could be a knife.

She stared at him. Felt how tired she was. She had decided to sing for him now. She was hoping this was her chance to escape. Maybe she could even save this man who was lying beside her in the dark.

And so she surprised herself when she said weakly, “No.”

Not until she uttered that word did she understand why. If I sing, she thought, he’ll kill us anyway. But if I refuse, I’m not sure what he’ll do. Not knowing was a form of hope.

She could feel him looking at her in the dark. She remembered those sad eyes that she’d seen outside his house on Ludvig Daaes Gate; it was his gaze that had lured her into this nightmare.

Then he started singing.

He didn’t hit the right notes, but that just made his song all the more bewitching, rawer and more heartrending, as if it contained all of his insanity. He sang the whole ballad, right to the very end. He sang about dreams, about the cruelty of the world and the great liberating slumber, and when he was finished, she was so tired that she didn’t think she could keep her eyes open much longer.

In the dark, she couldn’t tell what was happening. She heard him move his arms very quickly a couple of times. Then came the lonesome sound of something breaking. After that he fell down next to her and lay still.

In the distance she heard the sound of sirens.

34

Trondheim, 1767

Nils Bayer rode back
toward Trondheim early in the morning. He headed across Småbergan near the fortress and saw the city spread below him in the dawn light.

It was a small town. After the years he’d spent in Copenhagen, he would always think of Trondheim as small, and he was afraid that would be his downfall, in one way or another. But at daybreak, he couldn’t help but like what he saw of Trondheim: its rickety wooden buildings with thatched roofs, its streets and alleyways, its coachmen, fiddlers, scholars, fishwives, men of rank and men of drunken stupors, its whores and lunatics. He felt a certain affection for this strange little country where he’d ended up. An inexplicable faith in the future reigned among Norwegians. Meanwhile, he came from an old country, a land that had enough to do just holding on to what it had. But in Trondheim, in small, poor Norway, there was good business to be done. A man could obtain the newest books from Europe. Research was being conducted. People were investigating new ideas. This was a new time for Norway.

Bayer remembered, on a damp evening when he’d been invited to Søren Engel’s home, Bishop Gunnerus, perhaps the wisest and most learned of all the Norwegians he’d met, had confided something to him.

“Norway is a country that will soon be reborn,” the bishop had said “That’s why people here are looking forward to the times to come.”

These thoughts should have made Bayer feel more optimistic, but they didn’t. They could do nothing to fend off the nightmarish images from the night before. He saw them over and over again in his mind. The light glinting off the muzzle of the gun. The Swede falling, dead, a patch of blood spreading across his white shirt. The legs sticking out of the grave. The river streaming past with its enticing offer of eternal oblivion. Nils Bayer had become a murderer since the last time he’d seen Trondheim. And it was as a murderer that he would live out the rest of his days in this city.

He clucked to the horse and set off for the ferry landing. Once he had reached the other side, he rode straight home and slept the rest of the day.

*   *   *

He was wakened in the middle of the night by a dream that he was back at the river. The two Swedes had risen from the grave and were staring at him, as if they felt sorry for him. Then the flies had come and settled over them. The insects came from all directions and gradually both corpses were covered with flies until they became buzzing shadows in the night. He raised the gun and fired a shot into the dark. Then the flies took off and disappeared, leaving nothing behind. The two bodies had vanished.

Bayer tossed and turned in bed, then reached for his flask, which he’d set on the night table. It was empty. There was nothing to drink except for a jug of water from Ilabekken that had been left standing too long. He greedily downed the water, noticing that he was shaking all over. His nightshirt was drenched with sweat. He tore it off and got dressed. Then he went out to fetch his horse and rode off into the night.

In Brattøra he woke the ferryman, paying him three times the usual fee to cross the river. Then he rode over toward the Ringve estate, arriving a few hours past midnight. Everyone was asleep, which was for the best, since he hadn’t come here to make a social call. He left his horse in the woods outside the estate and walked the rest of the way. Instead of taking the road to the courtyard, he headed through the tall grass and walked around the house to the backyard. There he found the flower beds that had been planted by the mistress, and he began to dig.

He dug with his bare hands, getting dirt under his nails. It was hard work, but he was driven by a dreamlike obsession. His memories of recent events, the lack of anything to drink, the bright night under the stars—all of this filled him with an intensity that made him forget the limitations of his stout, heavy body. After a while he found what he was looking for. He pulled it out of the damp soil and wiped it with the palms of his hands. Then he smiled for the first time in days. He took what he’d found and put it in the saddlebag on his horse.

He rode back to town. When he arrived, there were still a few hours of night left. This time, he slept soundly, and when he awoke, he finally felt rested.

*   *   *

He went over to his office. There he found Officer Torp, who jumped to his feet when the police chief came in.

“People have been worried,” Torp said, tilting his head to one side. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been chasing a ghost,” said Bayer. Then he told Torp about his hunt for the Swede. But in this telling, the Swede managed to get away somewhere beyond Meråker and then disappeared into enemy country with the body of the dead man.

“We need to put this case behind us now,” he concluded.

“That would indeed be a good thing,” said Torp. “There is so much we have neglected these past few days. We’ve received so many complaints about watered-down beer, about Eriksen the baker selling moldy bread, and about selling in the marketplace without a permit. We have enough on our hands.”

“Yes, we certainly do have enough on our hands,” replied Bayer absentmindedly.

Then he sat, leafing through the notebook on his desk. It was the notebook that had belonged to the lutist Jon Blund, and after a moment he found a ballad that he liked. It was called “The Golden Peace.” He read the text, which had to do with deep slumber and sweet dreams, the kind of sleep that he wished for more than anything else. He noticed that this song was the last one in the notebook. After it, a page had been torn out, and the rest of the pages were blank. He tore out the ballad, then went over to the stove and placed the notebook amid the kindling on the floor. It would be put to good use in the fall. He turned to Torp, who was sitting at the other desk, seemingly engrossed in some important documents.

“There’s one more thing I have to do before I can devote all my attention to restoring order to the streets of Trondheim,” he said. “In the meantime, you’ll have to deal with the chaos as best you can, my dear Officer Torp. I suggest that you start with the moldy bread. It sounds like a serious matter that might bring in a sizable fine for the town treasury.”

Then Bayer folded up the pages containing the words of the lullaby, stuck them in his waistcoat pocket, and left.

*   *   *

“And you want only three copies?” asked Mr. Winding, holding the text in the air as if he could read it better from afar.

“That’s all a poor police chief can afford, I’m afraid,” said Bayer with an apologetic smile.

“You could order a less expensive printing. It’s not that we can’t produce the engraving that you want for the front. I have excellent craftsmen in my workshop, some of the best in the realm, if I may say so myself. But it will take time and cost money to create that sort of image.”