Police

3

‘Déjà Vu,’ Ståle Aune said, looking at the packed snowdrift across Sporveisgata where the December-morning gloom was receding to allow a short day. Then he turned back to the man in the chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Déjà vu is the feeling we’ve seen something before. We don’t know what it is.’

By ‘we’ he meant psychologists in general, not only therapists.

‘Some psychologists believe that when we’re tired, information sent to the conscious part of the brain is delayed, so that when it surfaces it’s already been in the subconscious for a while. And that’s why we experience it as recognition. The tiredness explains why déjà vu usually occurs at the end of a working week. But that’s about all research has to contribute. Friday is déjà vu day.’

Ståle Aune had perhaps been hoping for a smile. Not because smiling meant anything at all in his professional efforts to get people to repair themselves, but because the room required it.

‘I don’t mean déjà vu in that sense,’ the patient said. The client. The customer. The person who in roughly twenty minutes would be paying in reception and helping to cover the overheads of the five psychologists who each had their own practice in the featureless, yet old-fashioned four-storey building in Sporveisgata which ran through Oslo’s medium-elegant West End district. Ståle Aune sneaked a glimpse of the clock on the wall behind the man’s head. Eighteen minutes.

‘It’s more like a dream I have again and again.’

‘Like a dream?’ Ståle Aune’s eyes scanned the newspaper he had lying open in a desk drawer so that it couldn’t be seen by the patient. Most therapists nowadays sat on a chair opposite the patient, and when the massive desk had been manoeuvred into Ståle’s office, grinning colleagues had confronted him with the modern therapy theory that it was best to have as few barriers as possible between themselves and the patient. Ståle’s retort had been swift: ‘Best for the patient maybe.’

‘It’s a dream. I dream.’

‘It’s common,’ Aune said, passing his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. He reflected longingly on the dear old sofa that had been carried out of his office and now stood in the reception area, where with the weight racks alongside and a barbell above, it functioned as a psychotherapist’s in-joke. Patients on the sofa had made the uninhibited reading of newspapers even easier.

‘But it’s a dream I don’t want.’ Thin, self-conscious smile. Thin, well-groomed hair.

Enter the dream exorcist, Aune thought, trying to respond with an equally thin smile. The patient was wearing a pinstriped suit, a red-and-grey tie, and black, polished shoes. Aune had a tweed jacket on, a cheery bow tie under his double chins and brown shoes that hadn’t seen a brush for quite a while. ‘Perhaps you might tell me what the dream was about?’

‘That’s what I’ve just done.’

‘Exactly. But perhaps you could give me some more detail?’

‘It starts, as I said, where Dark Side of the Moon finishes. “Eclipse” fades out with David Gilmour singing about everything being in tune. .’

‘And this is what you dream?’

‘No! Yes. I mean, the record stops like that in reality too. Optimistic. After three-quarters of an hour about death and madness. So you think everything will end well. Everything is back in harmony. But then as the album fades out, you can just hear a voice in the background mumbling something about it all being dark. Do you understand?’

‘No,’ Aune said. According to the manual he should have asked ‘Is it important for you that I understand?’ or something like that. But he couldn’t be bothered.

‘Evil doesn’t exist because everything is evil. Cosmic space is dark. We are born evil. Evil is the starting point, natural. Then, sometimes, there is a speck of light. But it is only temporary, because we have to go back to the darkness. And that’s what happens in the dream.’

‘Continue,’ Aune said, swinging round on the chair and gazing out of the window with a pensive air. The air was to hide the fact that he only wanted to gaze upon something that was not the man’s facial expression, which was a combination of self-pity and self-satisfaction. He obviously considered himself unique, a case a psychologist could really get his teeth into. The man had undoubtedly been in therapy before. Aune watched a car-park attendant with bow legs swaggering down the street like a sheriff and wondered what other professions he might be cut out for. And drew a speedy conclusion. None. Besides, he loved psychology, loved navigating the area between what we knew and what we didn’t, combining his heavy ballast of factual knowledge with intuition and curiosity. At least, that was what he told himself every morning. So why was he sitting here wishing this individual would shut his mouth and get out of his office, out of his life? Was it the person or his job as a therapist? It was Ingrid’s undisguised, clear ultimatum that he should work less and be more present for her and for their daughter Aurora which had enforced the changes. He had dropped the time-consuming research, the consultancy work for Crime Squad and the lectures at PHS, the police training college. He had become a full-time therapist with fixed working hours. The new priorities had seemed like a great decision. For of the things he gave up what did he actually miss? Did he miss profiling sick souls who killed people with such gruesome acts of brutality that he was deprived of sleep at night? Only to be woken up by Inspector Harry Hole demanding quick answers to impossible questions if he did finally fall asleep? Did he miss Hole turning him into the inspector’s image, a starved, exhausted, monomaniacal hunter? Snapping at everyone who disturbed his work on the one thing he thought had any significance, slowly but surely alienating colleagues, family and friends?

Did he hell. He missed the importance of it.

He missed the feeling that he was saving lives. Not the life of a rationally thinking suicidal soul who could on occasion make him ask the question: if life is such a painful experience and we can’t change that, why can’t this person just be allowed to die? He missed being active, being the one to intervene, the one to save the innocent party from the guilty, doing what no one else could do because he — Ståle Aune — was the best. It was as simple as that. Yes, he missed Harry Hole. He missed having the tall, grumpy alcoholic with the big heart on the phone asking — or to be more precise commanding — Ståle Aune to do his social duty, demanding him to sacrifice his family life and sleep to catch one of society’s poor wretches. But there was no longer an inspector at Crime Squad by the name of Harry Hole, and no one else had rung him either. His eye ran over the pages of the newspaper again. There had been a press conference. It was almost three months since the murder of the police officer in Maridalen, and the police still didn’t have a lead or any suspects. This was the kind of problem they would have rung him about in times gone by. The murder had occurred at the same scene and on the same date as an old, unsolved investigation. The victim was a policeman who had worked on the original case.

But that was then. Now the problem was the sleeplessness of an overworked businessman he didn’t like. Soon Aune would begin to ask questions that would presumably eliminate post-traumatic stress disorders. The man in front of him wasn’t incapacitated by his nightmares; he was only concerned about getting his productivity back to its previous heights. Aune would then give him a copy of the article ‘Imagery Rehearsal Therapy’ by Krakow and. . he couldn’t remember the other names. Ask him to write down his nightmares and bring it along for next time. Then, together, they would create an alternative, a happy ending to the nightmare, which they would rehearse mentally so that the dream either became easier to cope with or just disappeared.

Aune heard the regular, soporific drone of the patient’s voice and reflected that the Maridalen murder had been in a rut from day one. Even when the striking similarities with the Sandra Tveten case — the date, the place — and the connection between the victims had come out, neither Kripos nor Crime Squad had managed to make any headway. And now they were urging people to rack their brains and come forward, however seemingly irrelevant their information might be. That was what the previous day’s press conference had been about. Aune suspected it was the police playing to the gallery, showing they were doing something, that they weren’t paralysed. Even though that was exactly what they were: helpless senior management under attack, desperately turning to the public and asking ‘let’s see if you can do any better’.

He looked at the picture of the press conference. He recognised Beate Lønn. Gunnar Hagen, head of Crime Squad, resembling a monk more and more with the rich abundance of hair like a laurel wreath around his blank, shiny pate. Even Mikael Bellman, the new Chief of Police, had been there; after all, it had been the murder of one of their own. Taut-faced. Thinner than Aune remembered him. The media-friendly curls that had been on the verge of being too long had obviously been shed somewhere along the line between being the head of Kripos and Orgkrim and the sheriff’s office. Aune thought about Bellman’s almost girlish good looks, emphasised by the long eyelashes and the tanned skin with its characteristic, white patches. None of which were visible in the photo. The unsolved murder of an officer was of course the worst possible start for a Chief of Police who had based his meteoric rise on success. He had cleared up the drug wars in Oslo, but that would be forgotten quickly. It was true the retired Erlend Vennesla hadn’t been killed on active service in a formal sense, but most people knew that in some way or other it was tied up with the Sandra Tveten case. So Bellman had mobilised every available officer and all the external manpower there was. Except him, Ståle Aune. He had been crossed off their lists. Naturally enough — he himself had asked them to.

And now winter had arrived early and with it a sense that snow was settling on the tracks. Cold tracks. No tracks. That was what Beate Lønn had said at the conference, an almost conspicuous lack of forensic evidence. It went without saying that they had checked the evidence in the Sandra Tveten investigation. Suspects, relatives, friends, even colleagues of Vennesla who had worked on the case. All without success.

The room had gone quiet, and Ståle Aune saw from the patient’s expression that he had just asked a question and was waiting for the psychologist’s answer.

‘Hm,’ Aune said, resting his chin on his clenched fist and meeting the other man’s gaze. ‘What do you think about it?’

There was bewilderment in the man’s eyes and for a moment Aune feared he had asked for a glass of water or something like that.

‘What do I think about her smiling? Or the beam of light?’

‘Both.’

‘Sometimes I think she’s smiling because she likes me. Then I think she’s smiling because she wants me to do something. But when she stops smiling the beam of light in her eyes dies and it’s too late to find out, she won’t talk to me any more. So I think perhaps it’s the amp. Or something.’

‘Erm. . the amp?’

‘Yes.’ Pause. ‘The one I told you about. The one Dad used to switch off when he came into my room, when he said I’d been playing that record so long it was bordering on insanity. And then I said you could see the little red light beside the off switch fade and disappear. Like an eye. Or a sunset. And then I thought I was losing her. That’s why she says nothing at the end of the dream. She’s the amp that goes quiet when Dad switches it off. And then I can’t talk to her.’

‘Did you play records and think about her?’

‘Yes. All the time. Until I was sixteen. And not records. The record.’

‘Dark Side of the Moon?’

‘Yes.’

‘But she didn’t want you?’

‘I don’t know. Probably not. Not then.’

‘Hm. Our time’s up. I’ll give you something to read for next time. And then I want us to make a new ending for the story in the dream. She has to speak. She has to say something to you. Something you wished she would say. That she likes you perhaps. Can you give that a bit of thought for next time?’

‘Fine.’

The patient stood up, took his coat from the stand and walked towards the door. Aune sat at his desk and looked at the calendar shining at him from the computer screen. It already looked depressingly full. And he realised it had happened again: he had completely forgotten the name of the patient. He found it on the calendar. Paul Stavnes.

‘Same time next week OK, Paul?’

‘Yes.’

Ståle entered it. When he looked up, Stavnes had already gone.

He got up, grabbed the newspaper and went to the window. Where the hell was the global warming they had been promised? He looked at the newspaper, but suddenly couldn’t be bothered, threw it down, weeks and months of grinding his way through the papers were enough. Beaten to death. Terrible force. Fatal blows to the head. Erlend Vennesla leaves behind a wife, children and grandchildren. Friends and colleagues in shock. ‘A warm, kind person.’ ‘Impossible to dislike.’ ‘Good-natured, honest and tolerant, absolutely no enemies.’ Ståle Aune took a deep breath.

He gazed at the phone. They had his number. But the phone was mute. Just like the girl in the dream.