Where Monsters Dwell (14 page)

After spending an hour at home alone, he began to worry. First he sent a humorous little text message to Hedda, so it wouldn’t sound like he was fretting, but after twenty minutes had passed with no reply, he called her up. Her cell was off. Then he got seriously worried. He called Hedda’s parents to ask if she was there or whether they were babysitting Edvard that evening. But they said they weren’t.

“I talked to Hedda yesterday,” her mother said in that unintentionally prim voice that always irritated him. “And she said that she’d be home today sewing a costume for Edvard for the school concert next week.”

“That’s odd,” said Vatten. “That’s exactly what I thought she’d be doing.”

After calling a few of Hedda’s friends and work colleagues, he was convinced that something serious had happened. At 9:30 he called the police. It was an hour past Edvard’s bedtime, and there was no sign of Hedda and Edvard.

At the station the police explained that they usually didn’t initiate an investigation for someone missing such a short time. These types of cases almost always solved themselves when the missing person turned up a little later than expected, offering some explanation—either plausible or not—for what had happened. But since a child was involved, and since Vatten was adamant that this was not normal, the police agreed to put an officer on the case.

The officer arrived just after ten. He seemed surprised when Vatten told him that he had still not heard from Hedda and Edvard. They sat down in the kitchen and went through all the available information. The officer got Vatten to call all the places where Hedda and Edvard might be. Then he called places he had called earlier to check whether they may have shown up in the meantime. Nothing panned out, which Vatten could have predicted. Then the officer got up.

“We’ll put out an APB,” he said. “I believe the situation will resolve itself, but we’re still going to take it seriously. If they haven’t turned up by tomorrow morning, I’ll send over a tech to secure any evidence here at the house, in the event that a crime might have been committed. The best thing you can do until then is try to get some sleep.”

Vatten stood there wondering how the officer thought he’d be able to do that.

Trondheim, September 2010

“The Vatten case didn’t resolve itself,” said Odd Singsaker with a glance at Gro Brattberg, who was sitting at her desk filing her nails.

Five years after being the prime suspect in an investigation, Vatten was once again in the police spotlight. The officer who had conducted the majority of the interviews back then, and the lengthiest ones, had undergone a long convalescence after brain surgery, and his thoughts had been far removed from police work.

“You’ll have to refresh my memory a bit,” he added, without revealing to his boss how utterly he had forgotten all about it.

“You’re right,” said Brattberg, putting down her nail file. “The case did not resolve itself. We were sure that the poor bastard was going to break down and confess to everything. But it never happened, and then we had nothing more to go on. If there’s any case where the expression ‘vanished without a trace’ applies, it was the Vatten case. Hedda Vatten and that boy, what was his name, Edvard, I think it was, never showed up again. Our techs came and went without finding anything that helped us in the least. There was no sign that the two had been taken from the house against their will, and no indication of violence. After a neighbor saw them come home a little after four
P.M.
, no one saw them leave the house or spotted them anywhere else. They seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth.”

While Gro Brattberg was talking, several memories surfaced in his mind.

Trondheim, 2005

After a few days, the interrogation of Vatten got tougher. He was often asked to come down to the station to talk there rather than at home, and after a week he was officially a “suspect.” The police didn’t have enough evidence to hold him in the case but anticipated that they eventually would. That was when Chief Inspector Singsaker took over the questioning.

There were several problems with the Vatten case. First, the strange alibi. How could Vatten have slept so soundly on the bus? The bus driver didn’t notice him except when he got on the bus, and then four hours later, when he threw Vatten off. Several other passengers had come forward and testified that they had seen him sleeping in one of the seats. But there wasn’t enough testimony to verify that he’d been on the bus the whole time in question. He could have hopped off, gone home and done whatever he had done, and then gotten back on the bus. That scenario would have given him about an hour to act, but maybe not enough time to kill his family and then get rid of the bodies somewhere where they were now impossible to find. Then there was the fact that Vatten himself was the one to report his wife and son missing. The missing persons report was filed with the police two and a half hours after Vatten had been thrown off the bus at 7:00
P.M.
Only Vatten himself could tell them what had happened between then and the time he called the police. It was quite possible that Hedda and the boy were in the house when he came home, and that’s when something happened. The problem with this explanation was that two neighbors saw Vatten when he arrived home a little before 7:30. One of them sat on his balcony until close to 9:00
P.M.
, which was after Vatten texted his wife, and then tried to call her, and finally talked to his mother-in-law on the phone. All of this was confirmed by the telephone company’s log. The neighbor on the balcony had been enjoying the mild spring evening in Trondheim to the fullest, and had gone inside only a couple of times to use the bathroom. He was positive that nobody had come out of Vatten’s front door, which he could see clearly from his third-floor balcony. The Vatten family car had also remained parked in front of the house the whole time. Jon Vatten’s alibi might not have been rock solid, but it was still unshakable.

The question of a motive was even more problematic. No matter how much the police searched and how many questions they asked, they were unable to turn up anything suspicious. As the case dragged on, it became more and more evident that their suspicions were based on little more than the old rule of thumb that the husband or boyfriend is usually to blame. But all police officers know that, while this assumption is an excellent starting point for an investigation, eventually it has to be confirmed by concrete evidence. Simply being the husband isn’t a strong enough motive for murder. They have to be able to uncover other circumstantial evidence, such as previous violent episodes, witness testimony about loud arguments, jealousy, money problems, or the like. But in the Vatten case such things seemed to be absent. The couple had certainly had their arguments, like most couples. There had been minor quarrels, irritation, and frustrations, but nothing serious enough to warrant a murder investigation. And as one wit on the police force joked, “If your marriage can be examined for weeks by the Trondheim police without a motive for murder turning up on either side, then it’s a very solid marriage.” Finally, the police had no choice but to release Vatten. But they did it with an uncomfortable feeling that there was something odd about him. A feeling that was reinforced by the fact that they had no other leads.

Quite a bit of time was spent examining Hedda Vatten’s extramarital life. But the closest they ever came to finding a clue was when a woman friend claimed she’d always had a feeling that Hedda had a secret she wasn’t telling anyone. She was the sort of straightforward and open woman who believed that good friends talked to each other about everything. Once she had even asked Hedda straight out if she had a lover, but Hedda’s denial had been quite believable. And there was no other lead in the case pointing to the fact that Hedda Vatten might have had a relationship outside her marriage. But that didn’t mean it was impossible. She might have been very good at concealing it. They found no one in the rest of Hedda’s circle of friends with good reason to wish her dead. One by one they were all ruled out. They all had solid alibis—her parents, siblings, and friends of both sexes. The Vatten case remained an unsolved mystery.

*   *   *

Vatten came to this realization when the police hadn’t contacted him for a couple of months. By that time he’d stopped talking to anyone but the police, so when the long arm of the law relaxed its grip, his loneliness was complete. Then one day, he couldn’t recall when, he got a letter saying that ultimately he’d been third in line for the position of associate professor, and not the number-one choice, as Professor Blom had intimated. The rumor that he might have killed his family had apparently reached the hiring committee. He never heard from any of his colleagues at Dragvoll. Most of his university friends lived in Oslo, where he’d gotten his master’s degree before he moved to Trondheim for his doctorate. His best friends called now and then, but he avoided them, saying he wasn’t in the mood to talk, so the phone calls grew less and less frequent. Vatten was an only child, and both his parents were dead. The intervals between days when he talked to anyone but himself became longer and longer as the summer wore on.

*   *   *

Vatten was naked when he opened the outer door of the apartment. He didn’t feel the early fall chill that had moved in from the north over the course of the day, didn’t smell the clear air. It was as if he were moving in a fog that came from inside himself.

He staggered a few steps into the driveway and had to lean against the car that had stood there unused for several weeks. It was wet from a light shower that had passed through, although he hadn’t noticed it. With one hand on the hood, he stood there swaying back and forth briefly before he continued. Slowly, like a sleepwalker, he moved over to the gate and opened it. Then he took a few steps out into Kirkegata. There he stopped again. Swayed back and forth a few times. Looked up at the gray sky, and finally fell flat on his face. He lay there in the middle of the street until a car came along.

The driver of the car was a neighbor on his way home from work. Actually, he was in a hurry, because he wanted to catch the soccer game between Rosenborg and Brann at Lerkendal stadium. But when he saw the man lying in the street, naked, and recognized him as his unhappy neighbor, he knew right away that the game would be played without him in the grandstand. He stopped his car and went over to the motionless body. He could see that Vatten had thrown up. Vomit had flowed out onto the asphalt and formed a pool around his face. He felt for a pulse. It was very weak. Then he called an ambulance. While he waited, he turned Vatten onto his side, as he had learned to do a long time ago in the military. Then he noticed the pill bottle in Vatten’s hand. He took it from him and read the label. It said,
NITRAZEPAM.
As far as he knew, it was some sort of sleeping pill.

Trondheim, September 2010

Maybe it would have been best if they hadn’t been able to revive me back then, Vatten thought, as he sat staring at the wall, waiting. It was a thought he’d had less frequently lately, and after his trip to the States this summer, he thought it had vanished for good. But now it suddenly seemed more pressing than ever.

He just couldn’t handle this. He thought about the things that the police didn’t know. They didn’t know about the DVD he had switched. They didn’t know what he and Gunn Brita had done. He hardly knew that himself. The question was: What was he going to tell the police? And what should he let them find out on their own?

Then there was the secret he’d been keeping since the suicide attempt. If anyone had known what he knew and had asked him why he didn’t go to the police with what was possibly the only explanation for the disappearance of his wife and son, he wouldn’t have known how to reply.

Maybe he could say that he’d lost confidence in the police. Most likely he was afraid they wouldn’t believe him, suspecting instead that he’d written the letter himself. Or maybe it was just the fact that it was all he could do to fight his way out of the dark hole he was in, with the nightmares, night sweats, and hallucinations. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, they called it at
Ø
stmarka Hospital. But in fact there was an even grimmer reason why he never went to the police. Because the day he got the letter in the mail, all hope was lost. Since they were gone forever, what difference did it make whether the police knew about it or not?

The letter was written on parchment. But it wasn’t old and antiquarian; it was fresh. A small piece. Small enough to fit into a normal-sized Norwegian envelope. There was only one sentence written on the parchment. Vatten had never doubted that it was sent by the man who had killed his wife and son. Nor had he wondered where the killer had gotten the skin to make the parchment. Vatten burned it in the wood stove the same day. He scattered the ashes to the wind from the veranda above the Møllenbergs’ roof. Then he went and swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills. It wasn’t his intention to ever wake again.

But he did wake up, and now here he sat, five years later. Once again involved in a murder. Once again he knew things he didn’t dare tell the police. And maybe most important of all: This time too, the murderer had taken skin from the victim. But now Vatten was worried that the police were going to find traces that linked him to the victim. Neither sleeping pills nor the
Ø
stmarka Hospital could save him from that.

So he sat there staring at the confining white walls. He saw himself in a silk-lined coffin with a lid that slowly slid shut. He closed his eyes and could feel the rocking and shaking as the coffin was lowered into an open grave. Then the sound of the earth falling on the coffin lid.

When Chief Inspector Singsaker came into the room with his boss, Vatten’s throat had begun to constrict, and he was breathing heavily. Through sheer force of will he managed to push away the fantasy that threatened to engulf him.

15

Interview of Jon Vatten

PRESENT:

Gro Brattberg,
leader of the Violent Crimes and Vice Team at Trondheim police headquarters