The Whisperer

Chapter 32

To Sejer’s surprise, Ragna wanted to continue. But she did not talk in the same focused way as before — she was more on her guard and watched him with keen eyes. She knew that something unpleasant was coming and she was steeling herself. In the end, she chose to beat him to it.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she whispered. ‘So just say it.’

Sejer weighed his words, as he always did with people who had been hurt.

‘After all that we’ve talked about, after all this time, do you still think it was Bennet who sent you the anonymous threats?’

‘Is it so strange that I came to that conclusion?’

She saw the compassion in the inspector’s eyes.

‘You came to that conclusion when he was sitting in your kitchen. I am asking what you think now.’

‘He said I was going to die,’ was her prompt response.

‘But have you, even tentatively, ever thought that perhaps you attacked the wrong man?’

She looked at him with scepticism.

‘Are you going to tell me that you’ve found some brat who went from mailbox to mailbox, and half the town received the same threats? I don’t believe you.’

‘That’s not the story I was going to tell,’ he said. ‘No, that’s not what we’ve found. No one else has reported receiving threats, like you. But before you got that first letter in your mailbox, had anything happened? Something difficult that might have triggered the whole thing?’

‘Are you saying that it’s my fault?’

Again, he gave her a sympathetic look.

‘I was fine,’ she said. ‘Everything was fine and normal. I like working in the shop, I like putting nail brushes from Taiwan neatly on the shelves, with the right price. Sometimes I build small pyramids for fun. The others laugh at me when I do that, I know it’s childish. I like sitting at the till as well, as I don’t need to speak. No one notices me, they leave me in peace.’

‘Would you have liked someone to notice you?’

She looked insulted, and did not answer.

‘Would you have liked to be noticed in the way that Walther Eriksson noticed you? To be seen in that way?’

Her cheeks were red now.

‘Yes and no.’

‘But it happened, all the same,’ Sejer said. ‘You got a message. Someone had seen you.’

‘Lots of messages.’

‘But you didn’t keep them,’ he said. ‘You can never take them out and read them again. I will never be able to read them either, and they can’t be used in court as evidence of the reign of terror you say you went through.’

‘I say I went through? What are you trying to suggest?’

She snorted angrily a couple of times.

‘You wouldn’t have kept them either,’ she said. ‘No one would. By burning them, I felt I was ignoring him. Destroying him. Denying his existence. I did what I thought best. And when I saw him standing down by the road, watching the house, I rang here and asked for help. I talked to a policewoman, but she didn’t want to send anyone round. And it’s not easy for me to make demands,’ she added, ‘given my voice. I can’t make a fuss on the phone. I can barely be angry at all.’

Sejer doodled on his notepad.

‘You didn’t ring, Ragna,’ he said quietly. ‘Are you aware of that? We never received your call. All calls are meticulously recorded and saved, and we can’t find your call anywhere. And I can promise you, we’ve looked.’

Ragna sat there and held her breath. At first she wanted to laugh, but then she saw his eyes, his grey eyes. She had never felt such compassion from anyone before, not even William, the Englishman.

‘I did!’ she whispered.

‘No,’ Sejer said.

‘It was a female officer,’ she insisted. ‘I remember her well. I remember what she said, word for word.’

‘But there is no one who remembers you.’

Her mouth was so dry that she struggled to formulate the words.

‘You make it sound like I don’t exist.’

‘Oh, you exist, Ragna, I can see you clearly. And I hear everything you say, every single word. But the telephone conversation that you told me about is not recorded in our archives.’

She looked over at the dog that was lying by the window.

‘You’re forgetting one important thing,’ she said. ‘I came to the police station in person and filed a report. And I handed in the last message, the one that he’d left on my bedside table, with that report. I told you, I took a taxi here, and it was Irfan who came to get me. Irfan Baris.’

‘We have spoken to Baris,’ Sejer said.

Again, that unshakeable calm.

‘Then he can confirm that he drove me here. That I came into the reception on the ground floor.’

‘And he has. He picked you up at Kirkelina, you were standing in the road waiting, and he drove you to the police station, but he parked a bit further down the road and sat there reading the newspaper. He knows nothing about what you did after you got out of the car.’

‘Then you must find the report straight away. Go and find it now!’

‘We have not received a report about a break-in at Kirkelina 7. Nor the message that you say you found on your bedside table. The two documents were never submitted.’

‘Yes, they were.’

‘We can’t find them.’

‘Then you’ve lost them,’ she said in despair. ‘Now that what’s happened has happened, you’re denying that I asked for help, because then you could be held responsible.’

Sejer felt awful, as though he had clubbed a child. He had asked her to be honest in her evidence, had said he was willing to listen, and for days he had listened. Ragna had taken him into her lonely world, and now he had rejected her version. He was questioning her perception of reality, he had utterly betrayed her. And everything between them, the trust he had so carefully managed to build, would be ruined.

‘You seemed to be confused,’ he said calmly.

‘Confused? Who said that?’

‘The people we’ve spoken to. Baris said that you were standing in the road, in the freezing cold, with practically nothing on. Your neighbour has seen you poking around in your dustbin on several occasions, and carrying the rubbish back into the house. People have also seen you wandering up and down your drive, down to the road and back again in a very agitated fashion.’

‘But I’ve explained all that!’ she whispered. ‘I was trying to lose count of the number of steps. So I could regain control.’

‘You were confused, Ragna. What came first? The confusion or the threats? Think about it for moment.’

‘I am not ill,’ she said flatly. She started to cry, without a sound, and did not wipe the tears away, just let them fall.

‘It’s not up to me to judge how ill you are,’ Sejer said. ‘Someone else will do that. But if that is the case, it would explain everything that has happened. And it’s an explanation that the court will believe, so the outcome will be different, and far better for you than prison. You will serve your sentence on different terms, you will be treated in a different way, and you will probably be released much earlier. That is why I am telling you all this, because I want the best for you. Because I want you to be somewhere where you won’t be judged, where you will be treated with care and understanding.’

It seemed that she had suddenly thought of something, a memory she could use.

‘You’ve got security cameras here. By the main entrance. And in reception.’

There was no change in Sejer’s expression when she said this.

‘We have looked at all the recordings,’ he said. ‘We have gone through them several times.’

‘Then you know that I was here, and you’ve seen the documents.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We have not seen the documents.’

He turned his laptop so the screen was facing her.

‘You can see the recordings for yourself. Would you like to?’

She nodded, but had no idea where it would lead. When an image of the entrance to the police station appeared on the screen, she leaned forward in anticipation. There were the wide glass doors, there was the paved area in front, the sign on the wall, the symbol of a standing lion bearing an axe. But no movement, not a person in sight. Everything was filmed from above, she was looking down on everything, just as the camera had looked down on her. Then a figure appeared.

‘There!’ She pointed triumphantly. ‘I’m waving as well, do you see?’

Sejer remained silent. He was not looking at the screen, he was looking at her.

‘Now I’m inside,’ she whispered. ‘Can you see that I’m inside, at reception?’

She saw herself, standing in the middle of the floor, bewildered, clutching her handbag. She was wearing only a pair of leggings and a thin, short-sleeved blouse.

‘Tell me what you see,’ Sejer said.

‘I’m not wearing very much,’ she admitted. ‘But I left the house in a rush, so it’s not surprising that I’m a bit stressed.’

She watched the screen closely. The woman moved to the right of the picture, towards some comfy chairs by the wall, where she sat down and put her bag on the chair beside her. She sat there for a long time. With her hands in her lap and staring at the door into the duty officer’s room. There was something helpless about the poor woman, she could see that clearly herself. Was that really what she looked like, so wretched and timid? Was that how other people saw her? The minutes passed. She glanced at the digits in the bottom right-hand corner, two, three, four minutes. The woman stretched out her hand and picked up one of the leaflets from a pile on the table. For a while she sat reading the brochure, looking up every so often.

‘What was the leaflet about, Ragna?’ Sejer asked. ‘Can you remember?’

She thought about it and looked at the screen again.

‘I think it was about love.’

He nodded.

‘What did it say about love, Ragna?’

She struggled to dredge up the memory.

‘Something about violence.’

‘That’s right,’ Sejer said. ‘Real love is free of violence. You were reading a leaflet from the Women’s Shelter.’

‘But I’m about to go in and talk to the duty officer now,’ she whispered eagerly. ‘I had forgotten how nervous I was, I had forgotten that I sat there for so long drumming up courage.’

As soon as the figure stood up, she was fully alert. She was going to file a report now and hand in the message as evidence. But then she realised that the only thing she had in her hand was the leaflet she had been reading from the Women’s Shelter. She crossed the reception area and went in through the glass door to the duty officer, where another camera started to film her, from another angle. Without saying anything, she put the leaflet down on the counter. Real love is free from violence. Then she gave the officer a firm nod and walked out.

The camera on the outside wall caught her as she left the building. She walked towards the semicircle of stone blocks, then started to walk faster and eventually ran down the street to Irfan’s taxi. The screen went black. Sejer struggled to find the right words in the silence that followed. She had lowered her head, did not want to look him in the eye. Her hands were in her lap. Her narrow shoulders sank in resignation, and even though he could not see her face, he was sure that she was flushed with shame.

‘It must have been the skulls from Malaysia that started everything,’ she whispered. ‘The ones that Lars wheeled out into the shop. I put batteries in one of them and the eyes lit up. It was as though they were looking at me, as though they wanted to tell me something.’

‘What did they want to tell you?’

‘That I was going to die.’