Blessed Are Those Who Thirst: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (6 page)

“Are you getting help? Psychologist or something similar?”

“Sure. Or, it’s a social worker, actually. Just as good.”

“Is it helping?”

“Doesn’t feel like it at the moment. But I know it’s important. From a long-term point of view, I think. So far I’ve only been to her once, though. Yesterday.”

Attorney Løvstad nodded encouragingly.

“My role is really somewhat limited. I’ll act as a kind of link between you and the police. If there’s anything you’re wondering about, then you just get in touch with me. The police will continue to keep me informed. They’re not usually very conscientious about that, but you’ve been very fortunate with your investigating officer. She usually follows things up.”

Now they were both smiling.

“Yes, she seems nice,” her client acknowledged.

“And then I’ll help you with compensation.”

The young woman looked bewildered. “Compensation?”

“Yes, you’re entitled to compensation. Either from the rapist, or from the state. There are special arrangements for that sort of thing.”

“I’m not interested in any kind of compensation!”

Kristine Håverstad was taken aback by her own extreme reaction. Compensation? As though anyone at anytime could give her a sum of money large enough to make amends for all the unpleasantness and wipe out that horrific night that had turned her whole life upside down. Money?

“I don’t want anything!”

If her tear ducts hadn’t been completely exhausted, she would have started to weep. She did not want money. If she could make a choice, she would want to have a video player with her life available on a recording. She would then rewind the days and go home to her father last Saturday instead of being destroyed in her own apartment. But she did not have the choice.

Her bottom lip, and then her entire chin, was shaking uncontrollably.

Her final words were spat out like tainted food.

“Easy there.”

The lawyer leaned forward, across the enormous desktop, and caught her eye.

“We can talk about all this later. Maybe you’ll still feel the same about it then, and in that case no one will force you, of course. Perhaps you’ll change your mind. We’ll leave it for now. Is there anything you need help with at the moment? Anything at all?”

The tall, slender woman gazed at her victim support counsel for several static seconds. Then she couldn’t endure any more. She stretched out across the desk with her arms around her head. Her hair fell forward to hide her face. She sobbed for half an hour of tearless grief while the lawyer could do nothing other than stroke her client on the back and whisper words of reassurance.

“If only someone could help me,” gasped the young woman. “And if only someone could help my dad.”

At long last she sat up again.

“I don’t really want anything to do with the police. I’m not bothered whether they capture the man who did it. All I want . . .”

She was overcome by sobs again, but this time she remained upright.

“I just want some help. And somebody to help my father. He doesn’t speak to me. He’s around me all the time, doesn’t know what he can do to help, but he . . . he says nothing. I’m afraid he might . . .”

Then she was overcome again. After another quarter of an
hour, for the very first time in her relatively short legal career, Linda Løvstad had to call an ambulance to come and collect her client.

*   *   *

They hadn’t much faith in the drawing but had printed it regardless. This had led to something, at least, and now they had more than fifty tip-offs about named persons. Perhaps that was precisely because the sketch was so devoid of character: indistinct features, a vague face, a shadow picture with no identity.

Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen held out the newspaper on outstretched arms, tilting her head.

“It could be anyone at all,” she declared. “With a bit of imagination, it might be four or five different men I know.”

Squinting, she turned her head to the other side.

“It looks like you, Håkon! It damn well looks like you too!”

She laughed and let him tear the newspaper out of her hands.

“It most certainly does not,” he protested, feeling insulted. “I don’t have such a round face. My eyes aren’t so close together either. And besides, I’ve got more hair.”

The newspaper was crumpled ferociously and thrown into the bin.

“If this is the way you’re conducting this investigation, I can well understand why no one has any hope of solving it,” he declared, still somewhat miffed. “Honestly . . .”

She didn’t give up. She retrieved the crushed newspaper, smoothing it flat with a long-fingered, slender hand, nails lacquered with clear enamel.

“Look at this likeness. Couldn’t it be anyone at all? These drawings really shouldn’t be publicized. Either the victim fixates on some particular blemish, so the man is given a nose that’s far too large and we get no tip-offs. Or else they look like this. Like a man. A Norwegian man.”

They stared for a long time at the picture of the anonymous Norwegian man with the insignificant face.

“Do we actually know he’s Norwegian?”

“Not with absolute certainty, but he spoke fluently and looked Norwegian. We have to assume he is.”

“But he was supposedly quite tanned . . .”

“Now you really must give over, Håkon. There are enough racists here in the force without you persuading yourself to believe a blond man speaking in Oslo dialect is a Moroccan.”

“But they commit rape far mo—”

“Cut it out, Håkon.”

Her tone was almost aggressive now. It was true that North Africans were overrepresented in the rape statistics. It was true the rapes of which they were found guilty were often unusually vicious. It was also true she found her own prejudices surfacing occasionally, as a result of too many encounters with curly-haired, handsome scumbags who lied to your face even when they’d been caught literally with their trousers down and every single Norwegian man in the same situation would have said something else: yes, true enough, we were fucking, but it was of her own free will. She knew all that, but it was quite another thing to say it out loud.

“What do you think are the hidden statistics for ‘Norwegian’ rapes?”

She waved two fingers of each hand in the air when she used the word “Norwegian.”

“Those rapes that happen after a night on the town, at office parties, by husbands . . . you name it! That’s where you’ll find the hidden statistics. Every girl knows they’re hopeless to prosecute. While the more ‘straightforward’ rapes . . .”

Her fingers waved in the air again.

“. . . the nasty assaults, the dreadful dark-skinned attackers, the ones who aren’t from here, the ones everybody knows the police are out to get . . . they’re the ones that are reported.”

Silence. Feeling offended, Håkon smiled, shame-faced and defensive.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, I realize that. But you really shouldn’t say such things. Not even as a joke. Of one thing I’m absolutely sure.”

Sweaty and dispirited, she stood up, leaned across toward the window, and endeavored to open it wider. The new curtains fluttered slightly, more from her own movements than any draft from outside.

“God Almighty, it’s scorching.”

It was no use. The window slid back to a gap of ten centimeters, no good at all. It had to be thirty degrees Celsius in here.

“Of one thing I’m absolutely sure,” she repeated. “If all the rapes actually committed in this country were reported, we would all be horrified by two things.”

Håkon Sand wasn’t sure why she stopped. Perhaps to afford him the opportunity to guess what two things would horrify everyone. Instead of taking the chance of saying something stupid yet again, he waited for the upshot of her silence.

“First of all: how many rapes take place. Second: foreigners would feature in the statistics to almost exactly the same extent as their proportion of the population would suggest. Neither more nor less.”

She moaned again about the heat.

“If these sweltering temperatures don’t come to an end soon, I’ll go crazy. I think I’ll go out for a jaunt. Want to come?”

With a look of horror, he turned down her offer point-blank. Another motorcycle trip was still fresh in his memory: a freezing, dangerous journey through Vestfold in the late autumn six months previously, with Hanne Wilhelmsen in the driver’s seat and himself as a blinded, soaking-wet pillion passenger. On that occasion, the excursion had been a matter of life or death. His first motorbike ride—and most decidedly his last.

“No thanks, I’d rather go and jump in the lake,” he said. It was half past four. They could actually go home.

“Strictly speaking, you should make a start on going through the tip-offs,” he added meekly.

“I’ll do that tomorrow, Håkon. Tomorrow.”

*   *   *

He was consumed by despair. It was sitting like a nasty gray rat gnawing inside him, somewhere behind his breastbone. Since Sunday morning, he’d drunk two bottles of orange-flavored antacid to no avail. The rat obviously liked the taste and continued gnawing with renewed vigor. No matter what he did, no matter what he said, nothing was of any help. His daughter did not want to talk to him. True enough, she wanted to be there, in her own childhood home, sleeping in her childhood bedroom. He found a tiny scrap of comfort in that, the fact that she probably was at least finding some kind of security through keeping him close. But then she wouldn’t talk.

He had collected Kristine from the emergency psychiatric clinic. When he saw her sitting there, exhausted, with dark eyes and sunken shoulders, she reminded him of his wife twenty years earlier. At that time, the young woman had sat like that, with the same vacant stare, the same hopeless demeanor and expressionless mouth. She had just heard she would die, leaving behind her husband and daughter, barely four years old. Then, he’d become furious. He had cursed and yelled and taken his wife to see every single expert in the entire country. Eventually, he’d borrowed a considerable sum of money from his parents in a futile hope that distant experts in the United States, the promised land for all medical practitioners, would be able to alter the cruel diagnosis so mournfully reached by fourteen Norwegian doctors. The journey didn’t result in anything other than the young woman dying far from home, and he spent the return trip with his beloved in a refrigerated compartment in the aircraft hold.

Single parenthood with little Kristine had been difficult. He had been newly qualified as a dentist, at a time when the previously lucrative profession had become less profitable after twenty years of social democratic public dental services. But they had managed. The middle of the seventies had seen the struggle for women’s liberation, something, paradoxically enough, that had been of assistance to him. A single father insisting on looking after his daughter was favored by all kinds of special arrangements from the public authorities, great sympathy from everyone he came into contact with, as well as help and support from female colleagues and neighbors. They had managed.

There hadn’t been many women. An occasional relationship, certainly, but never of particularly lengthy duration. Kristine had seen to that. On the three occasions he had ventured to introduce the topic of remarriage, she had sulked, rejecting every effort to curry favor. And she always won. He loved his daughter. Naturally, he understood that all men love their children, and from a purely rational viewpoint saw he wasn’t especially different from the rest of the Norwegian male population. Emotionally, nevertheless, he insisted to himself and his circle of acquaintances that the relationship between himself and his daughter was a special one. They had only each other. He had been both father and mother to her. He had tended her in sickness, made sure she had freshly laundered clothes, and consoled the teenager when her first romance collapsed after three weeks. When the thirteen-year-old, in joy mixed with terror, showed him her bloodstained underpants, he was the one who took her to a restaurant for fillet steak accompanied by diluted red wine to celebrate his little daughter being on her way to becoming a woman. For two years, he had turned down every insistent demand for a brassiere, since the midge bites to be covered by the garment were so insignificant any bra at all would have looked comical. He had taken lonely pleasure in his daughter’s brilliant
school grades, and was alone with his bitter sorrow when she chose to celebrate with friends four years later when she was accepted into medical school in Oslo.

He loved his daughter, but he couldn’t manage to reach her. When he collected her, she accompanied him willingly, and she had asked the emergency doctor to phone him. So she had wanted to go home. To him. However, she said nothing. Tentatively, he had fumbled for her hand in the car on the drive home, and she had allowed him to take it. Nevertheless, there was no response, just a limp hand passively accepting his grasp. Not a word was uttered. When they arrived home, he had tried to tempt her with a meal: freshly baked bread, sandwich toppings he knew she liked, roast beef and prawn salad, and the best red wine he possessed. She had seized the wine but left the food. After three glasses, she took the remainder of the bottle with her, excusing herself politely and heading for her bedroom.

That had been three hours ago. Not a sound was to be heard from her room. He rose to his feet, stiff from sitting on the sofa. It was American—low, excessively soft, and plump. The candles, palely flickering during the bright spring evening, were now sputtering, as they ran out of wax. Stopping at the door of the girl’s bedroom, he stood stock-still for several minutes before daring to knock. There was no response. Hesitating for a few more minutes, he made up his mind to leave her in peace.

He went to bed.

*   *   *

In her girlish bedroom, painted yellow and adorned with checked curtains, Kristine Håverstad sat with a teddy bear on her lap and an empty wineglass in front of her on a white-painted table. Her bed was narrow, and she had cramps in her legs from having assumed a lotus position for a long time. She welcomed the cramps. They became increasingly uncomfortable, and she concentrated on
examining how sore she actually was. Everything else receded, and all she could feel was the tingling, aching protest from limbs deprived of blood for a lengthy period. Eventually she could not endure it and lay down on the bed to stretch her legs. Even more excruciating when the sensation rushed back into her calves. She grabbed around one thigh with both hands, squeezing hard until tears pricked her eyes. All this to make the spasms last. She certainly couldn’t continue like this, however.