“Yes,” Madsen said, leafing back through his notes. “We talked about that. But you also said that it got better at one point.”
“Yes. It got better when I finally managed to kill someone.”
Erland Madsen looked up. He took his glasses off, without it being a particularly dramatic gesture.
“Who did you kill?” Madsen could have bitten his tongue. What sort of question was that for a professional therapist? And did he really want to know the answer?
“A rapist. It doesn’t really make much difference who he was, but he raped and killed a woman named Hala. She was my interpreter in Afghanistan.”
A pause.
“Why do you say ‘rapist’?”
“What?”
“You say he killed your interpreter. Isn’t that worse than rape? Wouldn’t it be more natural to say that you’d killed a murderer?”
Bohr looked at Madsen as if the psychologist had said something he’d never thought of himself. He moistened his lips as if he was about to say something. Then he did it again.
“I’m searching,” he said. “I’m searching for the man who raped Bianca.”
“Your younger sister?”
“He needs to make amends for what he did. We all need to make amends for what we’ve done.”
“Do you need to make amends for what you’ve done?”
“I need to make amends for the fact that I didn’t manage to protect her. The way she protected me.”
“How did your sister protect you?”
“By holding on to her secret.” Bohr took a deep, shaky breath. “Bianca was ill when she finally told me that she’d been raped when she was seventeen years old, but I knew it was true, it all fitted. She told me because she was convinced she was pregnant, even though it was several years later. She said she could feel it, it was growing very slowly, that it was like a swelling, a stone, and that it would kill her in order to get out. We were at the cabin, and I said I would help her to get rid of it, but she said that then he—the rapist—would come and kill her, like he’d promised. So I gave her a sleeping pill, and the next morning I told her it was an abortion pill, that she was no longer pregnant. She became hysterical. Later, when she was in hospital again and I went to visit her, the psychiatrist showed me a sheet of paper where she’d drawn an eagle calling my name, and told me she’d said something about an abortion and that she and I had killedme. I chose to keep our secret. I don’t know if it made any difference. Either way, Bianca would rather die herself than let me, her big brother, die.”
“And you were unable to prevent that. So you had to make amends?”
“Yes. And I could only do that by avenging her. By stopping men who rape. That was why I joined the Army, why I applied to Special Forces. I wanted to be prepared. And then Hala was raped as well…”
“And you killed the man who did the same thing to Hala that had been done to your sister?”
“Yes.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Like I said. Better. Killing someone made me feel better. I’m no longer a freak.”
Madsen looked down at the blank page in his notebook. He had stopped writing. He cleared his throat.
“So…have you made amends now?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I haven’t found the man who took Bianca. And there are others.”
“Other rapists who have to be stopped, you mean?”
“Yes.”
