Hell Fire

12 July 2005

“Do you think he said anything?” Jacob Skarre asked.

They were on their way to the home care services office. They had called to say they were coming. Someone named Ragnhild Strøm was there, waiting for them.

“When he came into the trailer, you mean?” Sejer prompted.

“Yes. Did they beg for their lives? Did he give them some kind of explanation?”

“For all we know, they may have been expecting him,” Sejer said. “He may be someone they knew as is often the case. Or maybe they fled the house at Blåkollen to go into hiding. In which case, the trailer was a good choice. But he found them all the same.”

As they drove, Sejer’s thoughts raced. The case required that they talk to a lot of people, and he ran through the questions he was going to ask in his mind. Now he wanted to hear about Bonnie’s time as a home health aide. He wanted to get an insight into what she did and how she did it. His own mother had had a home health aide for a while, before she went into the nursing home. She was dead now, and he had no siblings.

Ragnhild Strøm’s office was on the first floor, third door to the left. As they came in, she stood up and welcomed them. She had already put out two chairs in front of the desk, which she had borrowed from the office next door.

“I’m not sure I can really help you,” she said. “The truth is that I don’t know much about Bonnie; she never gave much away. So I can only tell you about her work. On the other hand, I know a lot about that. She was exceptional.”

“So you don’t know much about her private life?” Sejer pressed. “Nothing at all?”

“Not a lot. She had a small house in Blåkollen, where she lived with her son, Simon. There was no man in the house because the boy’s father had left them; so she brought Simon up on her own. He had a place at daycare. It was just the two of them. She talked about Simon all the time and I know that she hated having to drop him off every morning. It’s a hard way to start the day, if only people knew.”

“How long had she been doing this job?” Skarre asked.

“For more than eight years. When Simon was born, he went to a council babysitter to begin with. But I’ll tell you this, and it’s important: not many people last as long in this job, so it speaks volumes about Bonnie — the fact that she stuck with it.”

“And presumably she didn’t have the same clients all the time?”

“No, it changes all the time. Some die, some get places in homes. She had a total of ten clients. That’s two a day, so she was packing a lot into a day’s work. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’ll say it all the same — a lot of our clients are very demanding or difficult in other ways. Home health aides aren’t always made welcome. I feel so bad,” she said, all of a sudden. She closed her eyes.

After a short pause, Sejer had to prompt her. “Why do you feel bad?”

“Well, like I said, many of them are extremely difficult. So the truth is that a lot of the home health aides come to me and say, I refuse to go to Erna, or I refuse to go to Ingemar; I can’t bear being in that house. Which puts me in a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, they’ve been offered help from home care services, and in that sense, the home health aides are duty-bound to go to the addresses they are given. I’ve worked as a home health aide myself, and I know how it feels having to go to a client you don’t like. Many of them don’t want any help — it’s their family who insist on it because they need someone else to take responsibility. A difficult and ungrateful client is like a knot in your stomach; you dread it all week. Some of the old people call their home health aides at home to nag them. Bonnie was always the solution. It wasn’t in her nature to protest. She did what she had to do. In other words, she ended up with all the difficult clients. And not only did she go to them, but she also did an excellent job and never complained. I think she was actually quite fond of them, in her own patient way. And she has barely taken a sick day in all these years. A lot of our employees are off sick; they get bad backs. And then everything has to be rearranged, and others have to take on their clients. And again, it was Bonnie I turned to. How could I have done that to her?”

“Do her clients know what’s happened?”

“Well, of course some of them know — certainly those who are able to understand,” Ragnhild said. “We’ve spoken to all the families and left it up to them to tell their relatives in the best possible way.”

“I would appreciate a list of all the people she went to,” Sejer said.

“Do you want to talk to them?”

“Yes. Don’t you think we owe it to them? It might even be their right. We’ll be gentle,” he promised.

Ragnhild’s fingers tapped on the keyboard and she soon found a list of Bonnie’s clients and their addresses. The printer hummed.

“Do you think any of them will come to the funeral?”

She nodded. “I should think so, but not all of them. They’re close to death themselves. It’s only a matter of time; it could happen at any moment. In bed or in the bathroom. Goodness knows what it’s like to be at that stage.”