The Last Pilgrim (14 page)

His hand was suddenly heavy on her shoulder. He squeezed hard, as if he wanted to crush her with his bare hand.

“It’ll happen in just a few weeks. Maybe only a matter of days.”

“And then?” Agnes asked.

“When Hitler crosses the border into Poland, that will be it. If Norway is ever going to have any honor again, we must declare war on Germany.”

Agnes said nothing. The blood in her mouth now had a sweet taste that made her think of candy. That blood was a good thing.

“And then only the crazy people will survive what lies ahead,” he told her.

“Let me go,” she said. “Let me go, you bastard.”

Bratchard took her face in his hands and turned her head toward the dog’s ruined body.

“Only the insane,” he said and let her go.

She felt him shove something into her left hand. The spade.

“Now bury her.”

CHAPTER 20

Whitsunday, June 8, 2003

Carl Oscar Krogh’s Residence

Dr. Holms Vei

Oslo, Norway

Tommy Bergmann tried to regain his balance by planting his legs a little farther apart and gripping his cell phone a little tighter. With stiff fingers he pressed the speed-dial number for Dispatch.

“I need you two to go block off the street,” he said to the two uniforms who had followed him like children, their faces pale. Neither of them had ever seen anything like this before. But Bergmann had, and it may have been that recollection that had knocked the air out of him.

“Now!” Bergmann said. “And maintain radio silence.”

The marching boots tramped back through the living room. He didn’t bother yelling at them about destroying the crime scene. They’d already stomped around like elephants in there, totally ignoring regulations.

Bergmann stepped around the deceased and went out on the terrace where the dog lay. It looked like it was staring at him with its brown eyes. He followed the tether across the yard with his gaze. A white butterfly fluttered over by the fence. He watched it until it vanished from sight.

He felt sick to his stomach as he reentered the room. It had been years since the last time, but that made no difference. He felt the blood drain from his head and cursed himself for not getting enough sleep last night. The young housekeeper stood in the middle of the Persian carpet, crying in her hands. She’d been standing like that ever since he’d entered the house. The knees of her jeans were bloody. She must have fallen somehow.

In the middle of the floor lay real-estate mogul and former minister of trade Carl Oscar Krogh. His throat was sliced open and his head pulled back at an almost right angle to his skinny old body. His light-blue tennis shirt was dark with blood except for a small area at the bottom. The smell of urine and excrement filled the room. His face was completely chopped up as if a bird had pecked at him. His eyes were a gelatinous mass mixed with blood and the remains of what must have been his eyelids. Bergmann could only trust the housekeeper’s statement that it was actually Carl Oscar Krogh.

But the worst part was the man’s chest. Krogh must have been stabbed multiple times in and around the heart. The left side of his rib cage was a mass of bloody pulp. A surprisingly small knife lay on the floor beside Krogh’s left hand.

Bergmann managed to make it to the guest toilet in the hall. As he bent over the toilet bowl, he thought of what Hadja had said as he left the Sofiemyr gym: “It was so nice to see you again.” If he’d only been smart enough to turn off his phone on his day off.

When he was finished vomiting he noticed that the white washstand was pink. He was holding on to the faucet, not even thinking that he might have destroyed evidence. He looked straight into the mirror. Exactly the way the perp must have done only a few minutes before. Less than ten, maybe only five. Maybe the housekeeper had even crossed paths with him on her way up here. The hand towel next to the washstand had spots of newly dried blood. There was blood on the walls, even the impression of a hand. The killer must have leaned against the wall. Maybe even he had gotten dizzy from the sight of all that blood. Maybe in a moment of clarity he had realized the insanity of what he had done.

Bergmann heard a sound behind him. In the mirror he saw the door slowly open.

A pale, scared face appeared.

The housekeeper screamed.

She was clearly just as surprised to see Bergmann as he was at the sight of her.

Thank God,
he thought.

Her face was contorted with fright and she kept on screaming. She pointed at the bloody handprints on the white wall.

Then she stopped abruptly. Almost as if someone had slashed her throat too.

“The knife,” she said so softly he could hardly hear her. “You have to look at the knife.”

CHAPTER 21

Sunday, September 3, 1939

King’s Cross Station

London, Great Britain

Agnes Gerner’s final thought as the train began to move was that she would always hate the man who stood motionless on the platform.

Christopher Bratchard stared vacantly ahead in the white light coming through the glass ceiling. Maybe he was embarrassed that he had shown up here at ten minutes to midnight. Maybe his expression was no different than that of everyone around him. Embittered and sad about what was now inevitable. How right he had been on that last day in Kent. There was no turning back. Britain could no longer retreat.

Now may God bless you all.
She whispered the words from Chamberlain’s radio speech that morning to herself, meeting Bratchard’s gaze. A second later his face was gone, replaced by strangers waving handkerchiefs, some of whom were running along the platform, waving and crying.

Agnes gave a start when the sliding door of the compartment opened. The elderly conductor gave her a quick smile and heaved a suitcase onto the overhead rack. A woman about her age nodded briefly to the men in the compartment and sat down across from her. After exchanging some polite chitchat about how warm the weather was today, Agnes went back to staring out the window to avoid getting into a real conversation.
I hate you, Christopher Bratchard,
she thought, recalling Bess in her mind’s eye, the shattered head, the open skull, the eye that still stared at her as though the dog couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing.

She could barely make out the vaulted roof over the departure platform at King’s Cross. He was still somewhere inside, and she wondered how long his aftershave would sting her cheek. She thought of his words in her ear. His bad breath, which he tried to camouflage with mouthwash. His unabashed lust for her. Even Christopher, her own control officer. On his own initiative he’d accompanied her to the door of the train, as if he were her fiancé. As if he would whisper the words “I’ll wait for you” in her ear and run along with the train like so many of the others, or at least walk, wave, do something, anything at all. But no, he had stood motionless and stared into space with his hands in the pockets of his heavy tweed jacket, even though the weather was much too warm for it. The most violent, sultry storms had thundered down upon them all weekend, as if the Lord Himself were casting His wrath upon the world and Chamberlain in particular.

All six people in the compartment, four men and two women, looked grim, as though they’d just been informed that they’d contracted some fatal disease. Two of the men were middle aged, much older than those who were in danger of being drafted to the front. They spoke together in low tones about Chamberlain’s speech earlier that day. The other two men, about Agnes’s age, stared vacantly into space. Agnes noticed how exhausted she was. But never in her life would she be able to fall asleep in these seats, and the sleeping compartment farther back in the train had sold out long ago. She would sleep when she boarded the ferry tomorrow morning. She had booked a berth on the last ferry to Norway, the
MS Leda,
from Port of Tyne to Bergen.

She had never been to Bergen before. Although she was Norwegian, she had hardly been outside Oslo. She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate on the metallic clacking of the wheels over the tracks, the
click-clack, click-clack
sound, the steady rocking of her body.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that they were already deep in the countryside. Had she really slept? Only an occasional light passed by, like a tracer bullet over a battlefield, revealing a beautiful rolling landscape outside the windows.

She fixed her gaze on the young woman facing her, who cast her eyes down and began brushing something off her skirt. Her dark curls hid half her face. She seemed to be afraid that someone would recognize her.

Agnes went back to looking out the window after she found her pack of cigarettes in her handbag. The train began slowing down, and she reasoned that they must be approaching a town because there were more and more lights. Only then, as if she were waking from a dream, did Agnes hear what the men in the compartment were saying. “It’s war,” they said. “Now we’re really at war.”

That’s what Bratchard meant,
Agnes thought, letting the man next to her light her cigarette. If war came to Norway, she would have to be prepared to die. She would probably never return to England. The sound of the air brakes whined beneath the carriage.

She’d been trained for this. She knew that the job she’d volunteered for could mean the end for her. Still, for several fumbling seconds, that realization felt surprising. That was why Bratchard had pulled her close and forced her into a hug, whispering in her ear as a last farewell, “May God have mercy on your soul.”

CHAPTER 22

Whitsunday, June 8, 2003

Carl Oscar Krogh’s Residence

Dr. Holms Vei

Oslo, Norway

Tommy Bergmann tried to avoid looking at Carl Oscar Krogh for too long. He was lying more or less midway between two big Persian carpets. The pool of blood had reached one of them, and a little puddle of deep red had started to soak into the rug. A wheeled walker stood over by the sofa, and a cane lay on the floor between the open terrace door and Krogh’s body. Bergmann tried to imagine the course of events. The perp had obviously gone around the house and come in through the terrace door, and Krogh had clearly attempted to flee in the other direction, toward the front door or the telephone in the hall. According to what Bergmann had read about Carl Oscar Krogh, he’d been a real hardnose in his day, but both the walker and the cane proved that he’d become physically feeble.

“Was the door locked?” he asked the housekeeper, who was shuffling along beside him. She too looked as though all the blood had drained from her body.

“Yes, it was,” she said. “I think he must have tried to get to the chest of drawers, to press the security alarm. Or maybe to his cell phone, which he keeps in the same drawer.”

“Wasn’t he supposed to wear the alarm around his neck?” Bergmann asked.

A tear ran down her cheek.

“He said he didn’t need it. He said it was for old people, not an eighty-five-year-old like himself. And he only carried his cell phone around for a couple of hours in the evening. He accepted the walker to stop his son and daughter from nagging, as he said. But he never used it, even though his hip is . . . had gotten quite frail.”

“But how spry was he really?” Bergmann asked, though he could guess the answer.

“He got around all right. But he spent all his energy on the dog,” she said. “It wore him out. A man of his age shouldn’t have a setter. But he still went out walking with the dog . . . Although I was the one who usually took him out.”

“I understand,” said Bergmann as he knelt down next to Krogh.

“Did you make these marks in the blood?”

The housekeeper nodded, though the round bloodstains on her knees made the question superfluous.

“What happened?”

“I . . . just couldn’t stand up any longer.”

Bergmann nodded and leaned over to look at the knife, which lay in the blood next to Krogh.

A swastika. Even though the medium-sized knife was covered in blood, the swastika in the middle of the shaft was unmistakable. He glanced at the old man’s body.

Who could have done it?
Bergmann wondered. A Nazi? A neo-Nazi?

The swastika formed the center of a diamond he knew he had seen somewhere before. He racked his memory for a few seconds, then remembered, relieved that his brain still seemed to be functioning in this slaughterhouse.

“Hitlerjugend,”
he muttered to himself with a nod. “The Hitler Youth.” He’d seen a couple of those knives confiscated from neo-Nazis many years ago.

In the distance he heard a car door slam. Then another. Familiar voices were approaching—Monsen, Abrahamsen.

“Hitler?” said the housekeeper softly.

“You didn’t see this,” he said, turning to look at her. She was staring into space.

“Booties, put ’em on,” Abrahamsen said disapprovingly from over by the door.

“That’s my vomit in the crapper down the hall,” Bergmann said.

He expected some snide remark about vomiting from Abrahamsen, but he didn’t say a word.

Monsen’s eyes widened. Bergmann had never seen him respond like that before. Even Abrahamsen appeared to be almost paralyzed for a moment.

“Fredrik’s on his way up from the cabin,” Monsen said quietly.

“Damn,” said Abrahamsen. “The old man.”

“The gate was open,” said the housekeeper.

Monsen and Bergmann looked at each other.

“What do you mean?” Monsen asked. Bergmann could hear that for once he’d been caught off balance.

“The gate up by the road, it’s never open. But today it was,” the woman said.

“Nobody touch that gate,” Abrahamsen said, turning on his heel. “Don’t
anyone
touch that gate.” He pulled one of his rolling flight cases out the front door, which slammed after him in the draft from the open terrace door.

“Find a blanket to put over him,” Bergmann told Monsen, as if he were the chief of Kripo and not vice versa.