“And you’d like to stop them?”
“Yes.”
“Kill them?”
“Looks like it. It makes me feel better.”
Erland Madsen hesitated. Here was a situation that needed to be dealt with, from both a therapeutic and a judicial perspective.
“These killings, are they something you mostly just like to think about, or are they something you’re actively planning to carry out?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Would you like someone to stop you?”
“No.”
“What would you like, then?”
“I’d like you to tell me if you think it will help next time as well.”
“Killing someone?”
“Yes.”
Madsen looked at Roar Bohr. But all his experience told him that you could never find answers in faces, expressions, body language, too much of that is learned behaviour. It was in people’s words that you found the answers. And now he had been asked a question that he couldn’t answer. Not openly. Not honestly. Madsen looked at his watch.
“Time’s up,” he said. “Let’s continue with this on Thursday.”
—
“I’m going now,” a woman’s voice said from the doorway.
Erland Madsen looked up from the folder he had found in his clients’ archive that was now lying on his desk. It was Torill, the receptionist shared by the six psychologists in the practice. She had her coat on, and was looking at Erland with an expression he knew meant there was something he needed to remember, but that she was too tactful to broach directly.
Erland Madsen looked at the time. Six o’clock. He remembered what it was. He was supposed to be putting the children to bed that evening; his wife was helping her mother clear out her loft.
But first he needed to figure this out.
Two clients. There were several points of contact. They had both worked in Kabul, partly overlapping there. Both had been referred to him because they had shown signs of PTSD. And now he had found it in the notes: they had both had a close relationship with someone called Hala. Obviously it could be a common woman’s name in Afghanistan, but the chance that there could be more than one Hala working as an interpreter for Norwegian forces in Kabul struck him as unlikely.
With Bohr it had been the usual thing when it came to his relationships with women who were either his subordinates or younger than him: he felt responsible for them, in the same way he had for his younger sister, a responsibility that bordered on the obsessive, a form of paranoia.
The other client had had an even closer relationship to Hala. They had been lovers.
Erland Madsen had taken detailed notes, and read that they had both got the same tattoo. Not their names, because that would have been dangerous if it had been discovered by the Taliban or anyone else with a strict faith. Instead they’d had the word “friend” tattooed on their bodies, something that would bind them together for the rest of their lives.
But none of this was the most important point of connection.
Madsen ran his finger down the page and found what he was looking for, just as he thought he’d remembered it: both Bohr and the other client had said that they had feltbetterafter killing someone. At the bottom of the page he had made a note for future reference:NB! Dig deeper into this next time. What does “better after killing someone”mean?
Erland Madsen looked at his watch. He would have to take the notes home and read the rest after the children were asleep. He closed the folder and put a red rubber band around it. The band ended up running across the name written on the folder.
Kaja Solness.
43
Three months earlier
