After many hours in this daze, with aching wrists and stiff neck muscles, she put the permanent marker in her other hand and continued. She didn’t allow herself any rest the entire night. She didn’t even stop when she needed the toilet. It wasn’t the first time today she had wet herself, so why should she worry if she did it again? She was driven by the fear of a harsher reality overpowering her if she didn’t continue. She was constantly looking for bare surfaces to cover with her message, and eventually only the mirrors, fridge, and ceilings were left.
By that time, Rose’s hands were shaking uncontrollably and her eyes wouldn’t stop blinking. Her gag reflex had almost taken over her breathing and her head was swinging from side to side like a clock pendulum.
When Rose had written throughout the night and the dawn light revealed the walls and surfaces of the apartment daubed with a horrible message of powerlessness, her body was almost out of control. When she looked at herself in the hallway mirror between the myriad red and black lines and noticed how the Rose she otherwise knew so well now unmistakably reminded her of the distorted faces and lost souls in locked wards, it finally dawned on her that if she didn’t do something about this now she would perish.
When she rang the psychiatric ward pleading for immediate help in a quivering voice, they recommended that she just take a taxi and find her own way there. They tried to sound upbeat and optimistic, maybe in the hope that it would have some effect on her and encourage her to find some willpower.
It was only when she began to scream down the telephone that the gravity of the situation became apparent, and an ambulance was sent for her.
15
Wednesday, May 18th, 2016
Carl sat glued to the screen in amazement. With more than a million regular viewers, the crime documentary program Station 3 had become the most popular continually running program in Danish TV history. Other programs of that sort had a serious approach, carefully presented the police work, and were happy to lend a hand in the investigation where possible. Station 3 had an altogether different agenda, doing its best to explain criminal behavior based on the motto that all criminal acts were the result of poor social background, which was why the program often ended up glorifying the criminals.
The program Carl had just seen was no exception. It had started with a so-called exhaustive study of Hitler’s background, concluding that he had been neglected and that the Second World War could have been avoided if his childhood had been more harmonious. As if that was news to anyone. Then the focus switched to the behavior of fifteen American serial killers, who without exception were the result of a string of parallel punishments in their youth. Time after time, it was made clear that police work was nothing more than a social effort aimed at helping these criminals to avoid this otherwise unavoidable destiny at an early point in their lives.
It was apparent to any fool, and yet the professional psychologists and other consultants on the program made good money from analyzing violent criminals, murderers, fraudsters, and other scum as victims, while eloquent journalists used their dubious talents to interview the criminals about the abuse they had been subjected to themselves.
Carl shook his head. Why the hell didn’t they ever ask how these criminals could explain away all the terrible abuse they had inflicted? Serious matters were turned into entertainment, allowing politicians to sit back and breathe a sigh of relief because Denmark’s most popular TV program conveyed the impression that something was being done about the situation.
Carl pressed eject and momentarily held the DVD that the TV company had given him before throwing it in the wastebasket. What the hell had Bj?rn imagined that he could contribute to that infantile show? Now it seemed even more stupid to him that he had jumped on that bandwagon.
He turned to Assad, who was standing behind him. “What can we say about that rubbish, Assad?”
He shook his head. “Well, Carl, you might as well ask why camels have such big feet.”
Carl pulled a face. Couldn’t those bloody camels find somewhere else to go?
“Big feet?” He took a deep breath. “In order not to sink down in the sand, I assume. But what on earth do big camel feet have to do with that TV show, Assad?”
“The answer is that camels have big feet so they can dance the fandango on poisonous snakes if the vermin are stupid enough to slither past.”
“And?”
“Just like camels, you and I also have big feet, Carl. Didn’t you know that?”
Carl looked down at Assad’s small duck-like feet and took a deep breath. “So you think Bj?rn assigned us to the job to make things difficult for Station 3?”
Assad gave him a thumbs-up with his scarred thumb.
“I don’t want to play at being a camel to make Bj?rn feel better,” he said, reaching out for the landline. No, if anyone was going to play the camel, it was going to be Bj?rn.
As soon as he put his hand on the telephone, it rang.
“Yes?” he snarled. There was never any peace to get things finished around here.
“Hello, my name is Vicky Knudsen,” said a subdued voice. “I’m Rose’s younger sister.”
Carl’s face changed. This should be interesting. He grabbed the extra receiver and gave it to Assad.
“Well, hello, Vicky. Carl M?rck speaking,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. “How is Rose today? Did you give her my apology?”
It went silent at the other end of the line. Surely she knew now that he had seen through her.
“I don’t understand. What apology?”
Assad signaled to Carl to tone it down. Was his desire to attack really that obvious?
“I’m calling because Rose is in an awful state,” she continued.
“I’ll say,” whispered Carl with his hand over the receiver, but Assad wasn’t listening.
“Rose has been admitted to the psychiatric center in Glostrup again as an emergency measure, so I’m calling to let you know that she won’t be ready to come back to work for a while. I’ll make sure that the center sends you her sick note.”
Carl was just about to protest and say that now things had gone far enough, but the next few sentences he heard stopped him.
“A couple of our friends saw her sitting on a bench outside Matas in the Egedal shopping center yesterday, shaking all over. They tried to take her home with them, but she told them to get lost. Then they called me and said that I had better come down there. I looked for her with our younger sister Lise-Marie all over the whole shopping center, but we weren’t the ones to find her—that was a parking attendant, we were told later. He’d found her on the ground in a puddle of pee, half asleep against a car parked in the farthest parking bay wearing a blouse she had almost pulled off. He was also the one who helped her home.
“Then this morning our mom called to say that the psychiatric center had contacted her and that Rose had been admitted again. Of course, I called them immediately, and the head psychiatric nurse told me that they’d found an S-train ticket in her pocket, which had been validated at Copenhagen Central Station. So we think that she must’ve walked from the station in Stenl?se and perhaps stopped on the way home to buy groceries, which she normally does in Meny supermarket. But when the parking attendant found her, she had no groceries with her, so she probably hadn’t done that.”